An Interview with Dave Harrity, Author of Our Father in the Year of the Wolf

Dave Harrity

Our Father in the Year of the Wolf
www.daveharrity.net

WordFarm
www.wordfarm.net

ISBN: 978-1-60226-016-0

Click here to read an excerpt of the book.

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Dave Harrity was one of the first people I met when my family moved to Louisville, KY in the late 90s. We were both going into our freshman year of high school. I was still struggling to adjust to life in America after living overseas for most of the past 10 years, and Dave was a boisterous New Jersey transplant, already established and well-connected.

If I had to pick one person who I thought would become a respectable poet in my class, Dave wouldn’t have been my first choice. I knew him OK. We attended the same youth group on Sundays and hung out every once in a while. He was the guy most likely to swallow a lead fishing sinker, accidentally tip a canoe in ice cold water, or randomly inject “randy” into conversation, even in Geometry where a flustered “Madame Fro-bush” often failed to control the class.

But now that I think of it, there was the one time he conned some of us into going to a poetry reading we thought was going to be a killer ska show, and it probably would have been if the lead singers were singing instead of reading their poetry. Maybe it was an honest mistake. Maybe not. I didn’t realize Dave was a poet until after I had moved back to the area and looked him up on Facebook. He had a chapbook out, and had graduated from Spalding University’s Brief Residency MFA program, a program I’d later complete myself. I soon discovered that not only did he write poetry, but he was writing pretty good poetry.

Fast forward to today. Dave has had success with his book Making Manifest, teaches at Campbellsville University, and has played an important role in the formation of The Association for Theopoetics Research and Exploration and serves as creative editor for its associated journal, Theopoetics: A Journal of Theological Imagination, Literature, Embodiment, and Aesthetics. His two latest books are These Intricacies and Our Father in the Year of the Wolf.

Our Father in the Year of the Wolf is the type of book that helps bolster a poet’s reputation. Although the poems will often challenge the reader, the subtle but pervasive music is a strong enough engine to keep most readers engaged. Harrity's lines are often long, but pleasantly long the way Whitman’s lines are long. Lines that span the entire width of the page often fall naturally into pleasant "breaths."

The music of the poems serves as an ordering mechanism. Even when the poems are thematically dense, the music encourages the reader to trust the poet and to return to the poems again and find each time a richer experience. But even when it is difficult to process the poems intellectually, the book makes profound emotional sense. This is a great testament to Harrity's skill as a poet.

Dave took a little time out of his busy schedule to answer some questions by email.

First of all, congrats for releasing not one but two books of poetry in the past year or so. If you were to tell me in high school that you were going to be a poet, I don’t know that I would have believed you. So how did you come to be a poet? 

First, thank you for asking me to do this—I’m honored and full of gratitude! As for your question: Hah! I was a poet in high school, but I was quiet about it. No one knew except one of our classmates. I wrote her poems to try to get her to date me, and it worked for a while. She liked poems. The relationship didn’t last, but I kept writing. And just never stopped really. I became a poet by doing, not by reading. That’s important for me. I’ve since developed a habit of study, but it came after the fixation I had with creating.

We are both graduates of Spalding University’s MFA program. I can understand some of the criticism MFAs receive, but my experience at Spalding was overwhelmingly positive. Briefly, what influence has your MFA had on your literary career? 

I had a good experience at Spalding as well, and I think that had to do with the literary community it provided for me. It was a place where I didn’t have to explain myself—I could have this strange, shared artistic fixation; I could ask questions to friends and read and write alongside them. The MFA taught me how to demand meaningful interactions with other artists. I worked so hard in that program—took full advantage of my profs and peers. The MFA helped me understand how important it is to have literary and creative relationships—I still have some very close relationships from Spalding.

Of your two most recent books, These Intricacies seems more contemplative and accessible, while Our Father is denser, darker, and more experimental. Did you write these books with a specific purpose in mind or was their creation more organic in their development? 

They both sort of materialized as their own projects. Most of the poems in both books were written post-MFA. I was writing all the poems at the same time though, since about 2007. The poems in TI are certainly older, and an editor approached me about making a book. At the time, I had a manuscript. He looked at it and asked me to send as many other poems as I could. We worked from there to make the book.

Our Father was always conceived as a book-length project. I kept writing the strange poems and just piled them all in a folder. After about four years of this, I pulled the folder out and began stitching them together.

When reading Our Father for the first time, I was struck by its remarkable depth, and I feel like I have a richer experience each time I revisit the book. It’s exquisitely woven, whether it’s the thematic movement from poem to poem, illustrations of the moon passing through different phases, or the interaction of poem titles. What was your revision process like for this book? Did you focus more on the individual poems or the work as a whole? 

Thanks for saying that—man. That’s a really wonderful compliment and I’m glad it worked that way for you. I hope the same for all who read it! Originally, the manuscript was over a hundred pages. Which was crazy. I cut it down to sixty pages. Lots and lots and lots of cutting—ruthless. I tried to trust what the poems were trying to be, which was unfamiliar at first. But as the process moved forward, I began working in this strange, long tercet, and the voice in the poems began to ring clearer. The form really helped to order the book, which had never happened to me before. It was an uneasy delight the whole way.

You mention hagiography in the author’s notes. Could you briefly explain what that is and maybe give an example of the role it plays in this collection? 

Yeah… that idea—the narratives of the lives of saints—has always captivated me. The lives of early martyrs in the Christian tradition, especially. The stories are so fanciful and bizarre—they’ve always seemed to be the most interesting secrets of the Christian Church, though similar styles or narrative abound in other faith traditions.

In Our Father, there is this cursed family—focused mainly on the father and son. I read a story about St. Natalis of Ireland who cursed the Meath Clan when they wouldn’t repent from their evil. He cursed them to be werewolves. I just found the whole story captivating and thought I could use it, quite loosely, as the basis of the book since monsters/beasts—wolves, in particular—were dominating the metaphorical structure of the book.

In Making Manifest you argue for writing as spiritual practice. Our Father is full of biblical allusions and influence from other religious sources, but the book seems to embrace mystery and acknowledge nuance rather than evangelize or provide Sunday school answers. How is Our Father a reflection of your theology? 

Oh dear… I’m going to have to speak generally, and you’ll have to forgive me for it. I feel so estranged in/from discussions of faith and art. In my travels and teaching I’ve learned most believing people don’t want art, especially if it seems contrary to whatever they’re bred to believe, or—at the very least—art isn’t a priority of the faith experience for the majority of religious folks.

Sure, there are people who are serious about their faith and their art—I know many such people deeply, and I’m not talking about them here—but art seems to be largely dumbfounding to “the faithful” unless it does evangelize or affirm what’s learned in Sunday School. Whatever that nonsensical conglomeration of creative things is, I can’t usually name it as art or artfully made. On top of that, making art is an act of existence, of living into one’s embodiedness—one’s humanness—and there are more than a few people in the pews that think that existing as one is is sinful.

I told a student recently—he writes poems—that if he wants to be an artist and is a person of faith that he should bury that faith so deep into his poems that no one but someone just like him will know it’s there. If you ask me, all things worthwhile sing to one another from the depth. I also told him not to trust people who claim faithfulness but have no creative life.

Generally speaking: it’s usually dangerous or unfair to discern a person’s theology through a person’s art, I think. And the acts of mixing theology and art—with some fantastic exceptions—are often irrelevant disasters that suffer from didacticism and are blind to how extraneous, inappropriate, or just plain silly they are. My work has been there. That said, there are so many brilliant artists of faith that get little attention outside of literary circles—God, so many brilliant ones. And that’s a sin—that their voices aren’t known. As for Our Father and me, I don’t know if it reflects a theology, much less my own.

You experiment with longer lines in many of these poems, which can be dangerous when paired with the kind of weighty subject material and dense language you use in this book, but your lines have a natural “breath” to them that allows the reader to process them in small chunks. You also experiment with space and breaks within the line in a way that pays respect to form and tradition, but is fresh and contemporary. Could you talk about the role form played in developing these poems? 

As I said before, the long tercet became the book’s fingerprint. With lines like that, however, I had to really work to understand the caesura, which is something that alluded me until this book. Also, in this book, I worked to master metrical structures, which are important to me as a poet, and have always been important to my work. I think I gained some ground, but what I love about poems is that I will spend the rest of my life working on sounds.

How do you approach titling poems? You do it so well. “If the Silver Could be Given Back & Prophecies Erased” is a brilliant title, and the titles as a whole in this book carry a lot of weight and significance.

That’s a really tough question—in this book I tried to embody the poem with some kind of Scriptural, historical, or philosophical referent. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

As a parent to two kids under the age of 4, I struggle to get a lot of writing done. You have two kids, a wife, a job, and a literary career. How do you find time to write and be a part of the literary community? 

You don’t find it, you make it. If my writing doesn’t get done, I’m the only thing that forced it not to happen. Make time. No one else is going to do it for you. But if you’re lucky and smart you will surround yourself with people who remind you of what you should do and help you do it. And don’t forget to play with your kids every day.

Lastly, what projects do you have on the horizon that we should be watching for?

Right now all I’m doing is working on a poem every day and playing blues guitar. I don’t think anyone will be hearing much creatively from me any time soon. But if you see me, say hello!

What We're Reading Now

We're always reading fine works of poetry. This month on Poetry Matters, instead of an in-depth review or interview, you’ll find three quick posts about what books have captured our attention: 

• Melva Sue tells us about couple of books she recently read: Virgil’s Georgics and a memoir, Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford.


• Anthony Fife discusses Robert Hayden's Collected Poems


• Nancy Chen Long discusses The Book of Goodbyes by Jillian Weise

So take a look—you might find that next great book of poetry or a poet whose work resonates with you. And friends, please do share with us what you're reading. We're always looking for good books!

From Melva Sue Priddy's Bookshelf

Virgil’s Georgics: A New Verse Translation (The Yale New Classics Series)

translated by Janet Lempke

Yale University Press; New Haven, 2005

ISBN: 0-300-10792-7

A copy of Georgics was loaned to me by poet Chris Mattingly. His comment about how the same tools used in farming today were used in farming 2000 years ago hooked me. And so they were. I had never read Virgil’s Georgics in its entirety, so this was a pleasure. I soon found I needed a copy of my own so I could annotate it. Lempke, whose father was a farmer, retains as much of the original poetry as possible while translating into American English. She replaces out dated place names, and other obscure antiquities with their geographic, modern equivalents. She retains the four book division and line numbers as closely as possible. What a joy to read about the work of farmers, not as an idyllic pastoral, but as the daily struggle the work is, with ruin from insects and weather a perpetual possibility. Book Four reminded me of my family’s bees, however our’s arrived by mail.

Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford
by Kim Stafford

Graywolf; Saint Paul, 2002

ISBN: 978-1555973896


I return to this memoir written by the son about his father William Stafford. Kim Stafford mines his father’s journals, book, letters, notes and poetry drafts as his father’s literary executor. As well as chronicling the elder’s life and work, it reads as an honest portrayal of the strained relationship between son and father. The poet isn’t understood by his son, though they lived closely and often worked together, until after Kim delves into his father’s papers, and it then becomes part of his life’s work. I attended several AWP conferences and had the pleasure of sitting in on panels including Kim Stafford.

Anthony Fife Discusses Robert Hayden's Collected Poems

Collected Poems
by Robert Hayden
edited by Frederick Glaysher

Norton, 1985

Regarding “‘Mystery Boy’ Looks for Kin in Nashville,” the poem is so profoundly grounded, so deeply of this world that I can’t quite reconcile how distant the poem truly is. The story floats ten feet off the ground, never touching down, despite that fact that its full weight is a burden upon my shoulders each time I think of it throughout any given day. And I think of it often.

Robert Hayden’s work cannot, however, be pigeonholed by the likes of the “Mystery Boy.” Hayden’s oeuvre is quite varied, as would be any half-a-dozen-decades-worth of work, and knowing this, as I read and re read my way through his Collected Poems I can't help trying to recapture that feeling so strongly eased upon me by the aforementioned poem. I ‘v yet to find its like, though I have combed the pages many times. I haven’t found it, at least, in quite the same way.

Whether it’s a poem about Malcomb X (“El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz” 86-89) or the legendary fighter Tiger Flowers (“Free Fantasia: Tiger Flowers” 130-131), many of the poems in this collection select a topic, a very specific topic, and more or less stick to it throughout. In this way they are particularly linear. Highly imaginative: definitely. Conscientious in light of the multitude of responsibilities they name and satisfy: absolutely. They pull in and out their masterful focus, never resting long before a single storefront. But highly linear. Having typed and edited the previous paragraph, I think I’ve learned a little more about our “Mystery Boy.” Though many of Hayden’s poems are self-contained—leaning heavily on the book ends of a definite and logical place to start and stop—there is, it turns out, no damned kin in Nashville. The poem—organized but decisively nonlinear—will go on forever. And with no beginning and no end the poem has no choice but to swell and resonate.

Before recently reading his Collected Poems, my only exposure to Robert Hayden was his “Those Winter Sundays” (41). Due to being so commonly anthologized, I was highly aware of “Those Winter Sundays” and the role it plays in 20th Century literature. It’s a marvelous poem, of course; it’s earned its place in the thick books. And, revisiting it now after having read and reread 195 pages of Hayden’s work, I can’t help but feel it serves as the perfect halfway point between the two types of poems I mention above. Definitely linear. Yet allowed off the leash to expand and fill an almost empty room.

Of course, whether it’s the historical epics concerning the lives and exploits of notable personages including but not limited to Malcolm X and Tiger Flowers, character sketches that are also cultural and historical lessons (read the wonderful “The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield” 13-14 for proof of my claim), or a poem more like the one concerning the young whomever that begins this brief rumination, Hayden’s poems often tell much more about Hayden himself than the supposed subject of the poems. I’ve enjoyed getting to know him.

Nancy Chen Long Discusses The Book of Goodbyes

The Book of Goodbyes
by Jillian Weise

BOA Editions Ltd, 2014

ISBN: 978-1938160141


The Book of Goodbyes is Jillian Weise’s second book. Her first is The Amputee’s Guide to Sex. The Book of Goodbyes is the winner of the 2013 James Laughlin Award, which is awarded by the Academy of American Poets to a poet for a second book of poetry. The Book of Goodbyes is also the winner of the 2013 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, which is awarded to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit.

I found the overarching theme of the book to be what the title indicates—goodbyes in its various forms: loss, departure, death, loneliness. The book contains four sections that are presented like acts in a play (Weise is also a playwright): act “One,” an “Intermission,” act “Two,” and “Curtain Call.” With respect to subject matter, the sections titled “One” and “Two” center primarily around two things:

• The first is how other’s react to the speaker being an amputee, for example “The Ugly Law,” a poem that weaves in lines from a law about disfigured or unsightly people being restricted from appearing in public, and “Café Loop,” which reads as a sort of transcript of things the speaker has overheard in a café: “She's had it easy, you know. // I knew her from FSU, back before she was disabled. / I mean she was disabled, but she didn't write like it. // Did she talk like it? Do you know what it is, exactly?” (You can read the poem here, second poem on the page). “Café Loop” is indicative of the conversational tone of most of the poems in the collection. The collection is peppered with dialog.
   
• The second is the speaker’s affair with an older person, someone she calls Big Logos, e. g. “Poem for His Girl” (“I’ll tell you which panties / look good on you // psychedelic plaid / with ruffles on the waist …), “Semi Semi Dash,” “Poem for His Ex,” and “For Big Logos, In Hopes He Will Write Poems Again” (“Maybe it’s because you’re cut off / from your roots, and need to go / to Spain, be with your forefathers …”)

Act “One” tends to dwell more on the disability; “Two” tends to dwell more on the affair. Regarding the intermission between the two 'acts', it is indeed that: It's comprised of three poems that form a narrative about “Tiny and Courageous Finches” named Bitto and Marcel who live in a cave behind the Iguazú Falls on the Argentine side.

The last section, “Curtain Call” is one long poem “Elegy for Zahra Baker.” Zahra was a ten-year old who, due to cancer, was deaf and disabled (she had a prosthetic leg.) She went missing in North Carolina in 2010. Her step-mother confessed to dismembering her and leaving her remains in the wild. The poem includes snippets from news reports, personal reflections of the speaker, snippets of conversations between the speaker and others, dialog from Zahra herself.

Friends, I was quite taken with this book and will definitely re-read it. It’s quiet and powerful, unflinching. I find something about it to be irresistible. Here is one of my more favorite poems in the collection, “Goodbyes.”

Christine Gelineau: An Interview given to Caroline LeBlanc

Christine Gelineau is the author of the book-length poetic sequence Appetite for the Divine(Editor’s Choice for the Robert McGovern Publication Prize)and Remorseless Loyalty (winner of the Richard Snyder Publication Prize), both from Ashland Poetry Press, and co-editor with Jack B. Bedell of the anthology French Connections: a Gathering of Franco-American Poets. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Gelineau teaches at Binghamton University and in the low-residency MFA at Wilkes University.  Gelineau lives with her husband on a farm in upstate New York.

Dear Christine, 

Congratulations, and thank you so much for agreeing to this email interview on the publication of  Crave, your third full length book of poetry.

 I reference it briefly below, but just so our readers know at the beginning, this is in fact the second time I interview you. The first was in 2010 when you put me in touch with Franco-American poets around the country, and I interviewed you (and many of them) for a presentation in Montreal, which was eventually published as an essay in the International Journal of Canadian Studies in 2011. That first interview was by phone, and we were distant neighbors in Central New York at the time—you along the southern border, me close to the northern border. It’s nice to have the chance to “visit” again. OK, let’s get started with my questions, and your answers.  

1. Generally speaking, the poems have to do with the relationship of public and private worlds. In the first section, “Hard Evidence,” the poems seem to be more grounded in the public implications, while poems in the second section, “Crave” they are more grounded in private life, though both aspects are in most of the poems in the book. Would you agree with this, and why or why not? How did you decide to organize your manuscript in this way?

I like this question very much, especially the insight that a melding of the public and the private are the province of the poems. Unless a book springs from a particular concept, I think one reaches a certain number of poems and starts looking to see if there are any ways in which the poems speak to one another productively that might suggest a collection. The first time I went looking for that in this group of poems, my initial focus was on a kind of plain-spokenness in poems like Hard Evidence, Grace, Physical, What Men Do, etc. and the words “Seeing Things” came to mind as a book title. I could see I was immediately attaching to that title and that notion of what organized the poems so before I got too infatuated I googled Seeing Things to determine if it was "available." No doubt many will know that I quickly discovered Seamus Heaney had beat me to that title a good number of years ago. So back to the drawing board. I wrote some more, fiddled some more, and gradually I began to notice there were poems with a kind of stubborn insistence on something like optimism, or at least a desire and hunger for more that continued to propel us in a sensation of moving forward and I began to attach the word “crave” to that impulse. Maybe in part because I already had a poem called “Hard Evidence,” it next occurred to me that there were a number of other poems that looked at the many instances in which the world presents us with hard evidence that would seem to contradict that impulse to crave. From there it was easy to make the decision to group the “hard evidence” first, and allow the poems that “crave” to have the last word. Perhaps your sense of the public and the private in the poems suggests that much of what knocks us down emanates from the wider sphere while much of what sustains us is embedded in the private. I would have to think about that some more but I was interested to hear what qualities you saw the poems as sharing.

2. I know from FRENCH CONNECTIONS: A gathering of Franco-American Poets, and the interview you granted me when I was researching Franco-American poets, that we share a Franco-American heritage. And that your husband is Jewish, and you live on a horse farm. Would you talk about how any or all these facts influence the poems you write, and those you chose to include in Crave?

I do not think of my poems as a variant of memoir, nor do I try to occlude their grounding in aspects of my actual life. Family heritage is a fact and factor and thus is likely to pop up now and then. Poems like “Morning Prayers” and “Fill” have settings that reflect some small sliver of Judaism in America , and the poems I wrote about the two weeks I was able to spend in France in May of 2013 are included in CRAVE. My mother’s parents both immigrated from Ireland and the poems from the trip to Ireland are in the first book REMORSELESS LOYALTY. I am interested in cultural connections such as those but would hope that any claims those poems might seem to make about speaking for a group are very small and tentative claims, as that’s the most I would feel comfortable with claiming. In her poem "Sources" in the book YOUR NATIVE LAND, YOUR LIFE, Adrienne Rich considers the cultural narrative of "special destiny," a concept appropriated by the Pilgrims from Jewish tradition, and then folded into the narrative of America. I like that poem's interrogation of how "special destiny" can at once be "a thought often peculiar to those / who possess privilege" but simultaneously "the faith / of those despised and endangered // that they are not merely the sum/ of damages done to them." A heritage cannot avoid being an inclusion and exclusion, a comfort that we have to be alert to when it develops the potential to be a cudgel. When your identity enfolds "American," "French Canadian," "Irish," and through your husband and children, "Jewish," then like Rich one occupies a position of privilege and dispossession simultaneously. Finding the language to speak about racial and cultural identity is surely one of the vital conversations of our times.

As to the horse farm, the opportunity to have lived a life among other-than-human animals of the size and power of horses seems to me the very best grounding I could ever have had for poetry. Riding is a physical language you speak with the whole of your body to another species. Rhythm is embodied, incorporated. The skilled rider, like the poet with the emerging poem, does not control the horse; rather she learns to control herself in order to allow the horse the opportunity to express itself. What could be better training for a poet?

3. The “Crave” section especially contains what I would call life course poems: from pregnancy with your children to your long term marriage to the birth of grandchildren. (At least I’m assuming you are writing about your life and not the anonymous life of “the speaker”). When were the various poems written and what was you rationale for including them in the same manuscript?

The poems in CRAVE have all been written since APPETITE FOR THE DIVINE, my previous book, was written. APPETITE came out in 2010. So these are the poems written since then that seemed to me (and happily apparently also to my editor / publisher) to work as a collection.

4. Would you tell us the story of poem, “Sockanosset,” and how you won the Pushcart Prize for that poem in 2013?

I have Patricia Smith to thank for Sockanosset. She was teaching a workshop at Binghamton University and suggested an exercise she had “borrowed” from someone else (whose name, I’m afraid, I cannot recall). The idea was to hand draw a map of your childhood neighborhood and see if any ideas for a poem leaked into the process. I had long wanted to write about this memory of us neighborhood kids pedaling our bikes around the neighborhood looking for clues that might lead to the boys who had recently escaped from the nearby reform school. I think what allowed the poem to move forward that time was the realization that the poem’s true point of view was that of the escaped boys. Maria Mazziotti Gillan published the poem in Paterson Literary Review and then later that year Lee Upton kindly put my name in as a nomination for the Pushcart Prize, which allowed me to submit three pieces I had had published that year for consideration for the prize. The Pushcart had two guest editors and I have to believe it was Maxine Kumin who pulled my poem out of the slush pile of nominations and that it was her notice of it that allowed the poem ultimately to be chosen for the edition. Thanks to Bill Henderson, of course, for his indefatigable work producing Pushcart all these years, including that one, but then thanks to the posse of women who inspired, supported, and championed the poem along the route to that selection.

5. I also appreciate how grounded in the rural life and the body many of the poems are. They are not anti-intellectual, but neither are they steeped in intellectualism. Would you comment on whether you think there is an academic/industry bias toward urban intellectualism and a mind-body split in much literature today?

Now this question I love. As you can see from my comment on the horses earlier, I would identify this inclusion/melding/prioritizing of mind and body to be a core value to my aesthetic. To my understanding of poetry, it is crucial to have the body, not only the mind, in the poem--in its content, in its rhythms, in a kinetic, physical sense of the poem as a made thing. A significant percentage of the poetry published in our culture that gets the most attention is certainly published by and produced by poets with an urban sensibility. Is there really any debate over the idea that New York City, and to a lesser extent a number of other urban centers, have the most impact on what content, modes, and names are considered most significant in contemporary American poetry? Just because you live in an urban area doesn't mean you have to champion only work with an urban perspective to it but don’t we all find perspectives closer to our own easier to enter? And haven’t those of us involved in poetry all encountered some degree of dismissal of “nature poems”? Inevitably we are all “rural,” all dependent upon the health and well-being of this one and only planet but the utter dependence of urban centers on the rural areas that support them can grow invisible to city dwellers.  The impact of that on poetry promotion is, of course, not the most important of its impacts but we poets do think about it.  I have a panel proposal in right now to AWP for the 2017 conference in Washington, DC on the topic of The Nature of the Natural in Poetry Today: Postpastoral, Antipastoral, and Beyond. I hope to have the opportunity to have more to say (and hear about) the topic then.

6. What is your favorite poem in the book, and why?

I don't usually think in those terms. I like “Anniversary in Paris” because lyricism is my first love and because "happy" poems are so challenging to write, but each of the poems has some moment or aspect I favor. I'd be more interested to know what is your favorite and why?

7. What’s next on your writing agenda?

I also love the essay form and I've been working on shaping up a book-length collection of my essays. Any potential poetry projects are too young and tender to be talked about until they've had a chance to more fully develop. But thanks for asking.

Thanks again, Christine.

Powerful Desires: A Review of Christine Gelineau’s CRAVE, by Caroline LeBlanc

                                                                      

[T]ime is a horse, a runaway

none of us can dismount and so

the need is to find a way to enjoy the wind

that snatches handfuls of your hair as you race,

the horse’s mane, your man, the rhythm

and energy of the haunches powering under you,

their easy determination

to go on running.

from CRAVE by Christine Gelineau. NYQ Books, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-63045-020-5        buy CRAVE on Amazon

The front cover of Crave pictures the neck and head of a white horse on a white background.  It looks away from us, toward the edge of the page. Toward what it craves?  Any of you who know horse energy, as well as those who don’t, will find satisfaction for your poetic cravings between the book’s covers. 

Crave is a meaty, earthy book of narrative and lyric poems rooted in Christine Gelineu’s rural life on a horse farm. Many poems also concern matters beyond the farm. The book is divided into two sections: “Hard Evidence” consists of fifteen poems that recount what destructive cravings can cost the human soul and society, and “Crave” consists of 31 poems about cravings that push life along, through good times and bad, but ever forward. The half-dozen poems that have to do with horses left me feeling like the book is about horses, for that kind of energy drives the poems in this book about the powerful rhythms that fuel life in our earthly bodies. Also, in line with poetic trends, there are several Ekphrastic and other form poems in a text of predominantly free verse poems.

The poems in the first section, “Hard Evidence,” recount public and private events, both local and international.  They touch on the personal cost of ignorance, betrayal, criminal behavior, and just plain difficult circumstances.  They are heavy reading, and could discourage one from reading on, but that would be a mistake, so please, keep turning the pages.  

“What Men Do” is one of Gelineau’s horse poems from this first section. It combines a personal story about an injured farm cat that had to be put down with an account of World War I Australian soldiers who brought their horses to war, but were not allowed to bring them home for fear of carrying new diseases back to their island country.  The personal event: “While he aims, hesitates, she/waits. He shoots,/then again to be sure.//Apologists call it “the final kindness.”/What men do when they live up/to what is owed.”  These sentiments will be familiar to anyone who has had to have a cat euthanized, particularly if one is acquainted with rural and farm life.  The Australian story is much less common, and I was glad of the preparation the cat story provided.

                That final night together,

               the hardened young soldiers

                gathered their horses for a race meet,

                to drink in one last time that joy

                in what their bodies could do.

                Race over, they swiped and curried

                the sweated necks, sleek flanks,

                disentangled forelocks,

                fed their darlings tobacco and fruits

                then each laid his pistol

                in the hollow above his horse’s eye

                and squeezed.

Some of us spend time pondering the cost of war—in money, lives taken and damaged.  How many of us ponder the cost of war to animals—horses, dogs, dolphins we recruit, or animals we simply encounter in the execution of war in theater. And to the animal soul of people attached to these creatures.

The poems in Part 2, “Crave” I would characterize as life cycle love poems:  love of the physical life, the land and the world, love in birth and death, animal love, family and maternal love, love of art, married love, romantic love, and sexual passion ( of corn, among other things). For me a number of poems, some mentioned below, also hint at tribute to great poets who have gone before.

“Orbit,” the first poem in the section is an ars poetica prose poem that puts me in the mind of Maya Angelou’s ‘Phenomenal Woman.”  It is a sassy, musical dance with “verbs hot enough to broil a sausage on, even cooled it is too saucy for the gander.”  It joyously tugs and grinds the reader out of the somberness of the first section of the book.

“Felt like a Thought” is about the wonders of the fall season in the Northeastern United States. The references to “the tumult of geese chevrons/clamorously rowing the skies overhead,” provide an almost iconic image of the region referenced by so many poets, including Mary Oliver. 

“Anniversary in Paris,” about the love of the long married, references the trend of young lover to place a padlock on le Pont de l’Archevêché.  “[T]hey kiss and toss the key to the Seine./Forty years into our marriage we know better than to think of love/as a lock.”

“Curing” tells the story of life in a family house from the time of its building, to the raising and sending off of children and generations of horses. “These days I stand in the past even when I am/most present, most in the present, my memories the element/through which I experience experience. Is this richness?//or rigidity?”  A phenomenon and question well known to those of a certain age.

The first two lines of “Grace,” a poem about a dying friend are: “If you’re lucky, at some point/ordinary life becomes itself: something to inhabit, rather than/something to pass through. “ A better description of an embodied life is hard to find.

Let’s close with some lines from two of my favorite poems: “Love Among the Long-married” and “To-Do List for the Final Decades,” both of which evoke the joys of enduring marital love.  First from “Love Among the Long-married:”

                For their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary,

                the long-married plant a tree.

                Yes, they are exactly

                that stubborn.

                ***

                The long-married tell one another:

                Our memories are not what they used to be

                but in memory

                we are who we used to be:

                 your touch

                your touch alone

                and we slip slick

                into our 26 year-old bodies

                young  electric  and sleek

                no one else

                no one else

                can offer that

Next, some wonderful suggestions from the “To Do List for the Final Decades:”

                Fall in love in a foreign language.

                Compose a navigation song to chart your losses,

                And the way back.

                Learn to skate on the skin, the inexpressibly thin

                membrane where water meets air:

                master the skill of carving a caress

                into that tensile surface, a calligraphy

                as tender as hope.

And to finish, these lines that put me in mind of Leonard Cohen lyrics:

                Accommodate your own prodigal idealism: kill

                the fatted calf for truth; strike

                the timbrel, sing in the purpled

                shadows of dusk now, sing.

                Wave farewell with the torn

                scarf of your heart.

                Welcome into yourself the evening’s holy silence.

I can’t think of a better way to end in that song, or this review.

Caroline LeBlanc, former Army Nurse and civilian nurse psychotherapist, has had her essays and award winning poetry published in the US and abroad.  In 2010, Oiseau Press published Smokey Ink and a Touch of Honeysuckle, her chapbook about life as an Army wife and mother, and the descendent of 17^thCentury Acadian/French Canadian settlers in North America. As past Writer in Residence at the National Military Family Museum, she wrote the script for the museum’s traveling exhibit, Sacrifice & Service; co-produced and co-created the script for Telling Albuquerque and 4 Voices stage performances; and facilitated Standing Down, a NM Humanities Council book discussion group for veterans and family members. With Mitra Bishop, Roshi, Mountain Gate Zen Center, New Mexico, she offers veterans and women military family members Day of Mindfulness Meditation & Writing Retreats.  She also serves as clinical staff for Mountain Gate Regaining Balance residential retreats for the same individuals.  Before leaving the Fort Drum, NY area, in 2012 she offered Writing For Your Lifeprograms to wounded warriors and military family members.  In 2011, Spalding University awarded her a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative writing.  Her art has won awards in New York and New Mexico.  She is a member of Albuquerque’s Rainbow Artists Collective, and a founding member of the Apronistas Collective of women artists who regularly mount community art shows highlighting women’s rights and ecological issues.   

Biography & an Interview with Gayle Lauradunn by Caroline LeBlanc

BIOGRAPHY

Gayle Lauradunn is a long time and key figure in the Albuquerque writing community, particularly the poety community where she has just completed a two year tenure as Chair of the Albuquerque chapter of the New Mexico Poetry Society. Under her leadership, the membership increased dramatically. I first met her when I began my gradual relocation here in 2011.  In Summer 2013, we both participated in a workshop with Louise Gluck at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. Gayle workshoped several of the poems from Reaching for Air at that workshop, and they were well received. Until we all got too busy, Gayle and I were members of a five person poetry writing group.  The following biography is from Gayle.

Gayle Lauradunn reinvents herself about every five to seven years. Along the way she was co-organizer of the first National Women's Poetry Festival, a 6-day event held at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1974. While there she earned a doctorate based on her dissertation for which she used 20th Century American poetry to create a curriculum to teach high school students about race, class, and gender. She learned about the crossover of race and class while living in the poor Black ghetto in Nashville, Tennessee. For five years she participated in the editorial collective that published Chomo-Uri: A Women's Literary and Arts Journal. 

After earning a B.A. in English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, she became a feature writer for a weekly newspaper, and over the next 20 years worked as a free-lance journalist. Her anti-Vietnam War activism led her to being the Executive Director of the Veterans Education Project, a group of Vietnam, Korean, and Desert Storm veterans who spoke to high school students about the realities of war and military service.

As a single parent, she travelled extensively with her son throughout the United States, camping, backpacking, white water rafting, exploring museums and historical sites. An avid traveller, she has been to all 50 states and more than 20 countries, Bhutan and Antarctica being her favorites to date.

Her poems have been published in numerous journals, anthologies, and online. The poem "Telling" has been included in numerous anthologies, most recently VEILS, HALOES & SHACKLES: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women, published in Israel.

Interview

Thanks for agreeing to this interview.  I have to say that I am just blown away by the poems in your book.    After this, my 3^rd reading I think I’m ready to ask some questions. Your book reads like a memoir, partly of a time forgotten by many in our affluent and urbanized society.  In fact, for me, the stories the poems tell personalize, even as they recall, scenes from The Grapes of Wrath. Here are my questions to you as the poet.

Caroline:  Would you speak about any autobiographical qualities of this book of poems?  Do you regard it as a memoir in verse?

Gayle:Thank you for the opportunity to address some issues I hope the book raises for people. I did not think about it as a memoir until the publisher put it in the double categories of Poetry/Memoir. This caused me to look at the poems differently. Of course, they are memoir, but I didn't set out to write memoir. It had never occurred to me to write one because I didn't want to re-live the pain, the ugliness, the hatefulness of my childhood. The poems began at the Squaw Valley Writers Conference in July 1991 where I spent the week working with Galway Kinnell, Lucille Clifton, C.K. Williams, and Sharon Olds. We were required to have a new poem every morning by 7 a.m. (which we learned after we arrived). I panicked as I had never written a poem a day. The house I shared with five other participants had three floors and the top floor had a balcony just big enough for one chair and a small table. I would sit there and look out across the valley to the mountains in the distance and let my mind go blank. An image, a vague memory, an incident would occur to me and I would write. Of the seven poems I wrote that week, four are in the book, two have been published in journals, and one I threw away.

Since my childhood is post-WWII, I've never thought to make a comparison to The Grapes of Wrath. In my mind, my family was not the Joads. But, of course, we were in many ways. However, I see your point and you've made me think about the comparisons. Which, actually, I prefer not to do.

After leaving Squaw I continued to write these poems over the next several years. What shocked me time after time was how each poem turned out, what each poem revealed to me. I realized that I had carried a burden all my life, that these images were constantly in my head and weighed on me. Since the book has been published, the burden has eased. Unfortunately, there are many more images; I could probably fill another book with such poems, and they occur to me frequently, but I need to move on to other content in my poetry so resist writing them.

Caroline:  Some poems are written in first person, some in third.  Would you say something about how you chose which voice to write in, and perhaps give us more insight into that choice by illustrating with a poem from each voice?

Gayle:I had to write in third person for the childhood poems as a means of gaining distance. It was much too painful to write them in first person with the exception of the few more light hearted ones. The adult voice is in first person because I had both time and geographical distance that allowed me to cope with the images. By the time these poems began, I had not been to Texas for 38 years and had been away from my family for 30 years, living 3,000 miles away in Massachusetts. A good example of a third person poem is:

Suspension

On the porch of broken boards

the child arranges stones into patterns.

Inside her mother wanders

from room to room. She leaves

the house only to stand

on the porch. Rubs her hands.

With slow feet the child

enters. Dries the dishes,

flowers faded and chipped

as though ants had dined.

Watches the hands. Feels

the first sting on her cheek.

Feels the hard leather

on her legs. Long curls snatched

in the hand. She dances a high

jig against the belt.

Tears and pleas will break

the silence. She refuses.

There is no way I could have written this poem in first person. I was always told the slaps were love pats, and I was ridiculed for crying about them. The belt was almost an everyday occurrence. Hence, my desire to escape, to go find the sheep and rattlesnakes.

An example of a first person poem is "Heritage". It takes place more than 16 years after leaving home.

Heritage

In the photograph my son and I stand

in Great-Great-Granddad's corn crib

built of poles glossy from years

of corn-husk polishing, ears fresh picked

to age for cattle feed, side by side

we face the camera, my arm across

his shoulder, my hand rests lightly there.

We stare beyond, as though to see the people

in sun-faded overalls walk the whispery

rows in west Texas heat, and I like to think,

in his child way, he understands what we do,

that he hears them call to each other

down the rows, that he brings their voices

with him into his music, those inward

songs children make of their world.

Since my family no longer lived in Texas and I would have no interference, I took my son who had just turned six to visit for the first time. He still remembers some things about the trip and tells me that these poems help him to recall other aspects. The poem "The Visit" reflects his ambivalence at the time. The focus of the trip was to show him locations and to let him know the contrast between the environment of my childhood and his in western Massachusetts. Also, I wanted him to meet his quite elderly great-grandparents since by then I could protect him from the harshness of my maternal grandmother.

Caroline:  The poems in Reaching for Air do indeed leave one breathless in the way they portray the emotional brutality of grinding poverty and a confusingly duplicitous religious, yet cruel, outlook toward life—particularly from the child’s point of view.  Roughly in what years are the poems set:  for the young girl in the beginning of the book, for the adult returning with her son and to visit her aging grandparents?

Gayle:Most of the poems for the young girl are set in the late 1940s; those of the woman 30-35 years later.

Caroline:Travel, animals and imagination figure large in these narrative poems.  They seem to offer a promise of relief and escape from the prison of poverty, drought, desert and sex-role expectations.  Would you say that is an accurate perception, and if so, share your thoughts about it?

Gayle:Yes, I agree. I took every opportunity to go outside the house, to be on my own, anything to be away from my mother, and my father when he was not working. I was 13 when we moved to Seattle and that was definitely a culture shock: from rural to city, from my Texas twang to the Northwest dialect, from all white (and a few "Mexicans") schools to a school with a mix of African-Americans and Asians, very few of which I had ever seen before. And, worst of all, no space to walk in, no open sky, no horizon to look toward, and no wild animals to relate to. I felt hemmed in with the tall trees and mountains. And, worst of all, very little sunshine. My way of leaving the house was to become involved in many organizations and to sign up for every committee both at school and with various organizations such as Girl Scouts.

I don't know where it came from, but at that young age I desired, absolutely craved, something different. It was more a gut feeling than one I could articulate. I felt there had to be a better life, a better way of being.

I started writing "poems" when I was nine and never stopped. These writings mostly expressed my frustration and anger and feelings of helplessness. I didn't know the word 'power' then but I felt powerless in the most extreme way.

Caroline:Despite the harshness of much of the content, compassion rings through for the various characters in these narrative poems.  How did you, as the writer, find your way to writing in such a factual, yet non-attacking manner?

Gayle:I let the facts and images speak for themselves. I try to write poems that tell a story, that paint a picture. I want the reader, or listener, to see and hear the story. I want readers to decide for themselves, based on the facts and images, how they feel and think about the various characters. We all like stories, whether they make us laugh, cry, or cringe. Stories are what we all remember. I want my poems to communicate to a broad audience and stories do that.

Caroline:  How long did it take you to write this book?  What did the process of writing it entail for you?

Gayle:It was written sporadically over a period of 15 or so years beginning in 1991. I wasn't trying to write a book, only poems as they occurred. In Massachusetts I was a member of a critique group that met weekly. Timothy Liu (https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/timothy-liu)was also a member for about 3 years and he was the person who said the poems make a book. I was surprised, but Tim insisted and created the first arrangement of the poems. The final arrangement is close to what he suggested although I did delete some poems and wrote new ones later that are included.

Until recently I have never been able to write consistently yet never stopped writing. Being a single parent with no money and poor health, I struggled through graduate school and numerous part-time jobs. My son also had health issues and between the two of us I spent a lot of time in doctors' offices. When my own issues were finally diagnosed in 1988, I was then able to work full time and not worry constantly about money. Writing was a compulsion, an obsession, something I needed to do that was all mine. I always wrote in a hurry and, therefore, wrote a lot of bad poems, never having the time to revise. I have stacks of those poems that I have looked through to determine what could possibly be salvaged. Very little, yet I hang on to them because, I think, they remind me of my journey.

Caroline:Please tell us of your journey to get Reaching for Air published?

Gayle:I sent the manuscript to about 40 publishers over some eight or ten years. During that time I continued to revise. In 2013 I took a workshop with Louise Gluck whose help and support were invaluable and gave me the courage to force the issue and self-publish. Over the years of this journey I began to realize from the comments that editors made, that they either didn't understand the poems or were in denial about the issues of class the poems raise. As a country we love to talk about, lament about, debate about, rant about racism. But we don't like to even mention class. I've noticed that when it is mentioned on the news, it is quickly passed over. As a child, I was painfully aware of the difference between my home and that of a few friends whose middle or upper middle class homes I was invited into, but I did not understand that this was part of the class difference. People don't like to admit that white people are poor. In 1976 I was invited to apply for a Danforth Foundation Grant for Women to help finance work on a graduate degree. The application form was lengthy and required several in-depth essays. On the third line of one of the essays I stated that I am white. Yet, when I arrived at Harvard University for an interview, the self-satisfied pompous white woman who had summoned me took one look at me and said "I thought you were black". End of interview. She couldn't imagine a white person having the experiences I had had.

In 1967 I was living in Nashville where my husband taught at Fisk University. We lived in the faculty housing that surrounded the campus that sits in the midst of the poorest part of the black ghetto (I don't know if anything has changed since I've never returned there). A few houses up the street Robert Hayden resided with his family. He asked to see my poems and I invited him for tea. Sitting in the living room the conversation turned to the location of the campus in the midst of such poverty. I'll never forget Bob's words as he gestured to the surrounding area "I have nothing to do with these people". That was my first instruction that class crosses racial and ethnic lines.

He was a wonderful man with whom I had a number of stimulating conversations. I was extremely pleased for him when he was named U.S. Poet Laureate. And, I will always be grateful to him for being the first to publish my poems. At the time he was poetry editor of the Baha'i journal World Order. About a year later two of my poems appeared in the journal.

Later that spring I had further instruction in the vagaries of class when I participated in a door-to-door survey conducted by a group of doctors who were determining whether to build a low-cost or free health clinic in either the poor black ghetto or the poor white ghetto. The questionnaire required about 45 minutes to ask people questions and record their responses. I was assigned homes in both ghettos. The residents had no idea I would be knocking on their doors. What a revelation! For the most part the white homes were a mess with clothes thrown everywhere and dishes piled up in the sink. The rooms were often filthy. The people spent a lot of time ranting about how they were better than the blacks (of course they used a different word) because they were white. By contrast, the black homes were poor, sometimes no better than shacks, but neat with clothes hung up on wooden pegs on the walls and everything clean. The people were polite and gracious although a bit uncomfortable with the white lady who came calling. These experiences reflected my own uneasy but not yet fully acknowledged awareness of and experience of the class divide.

Thanks to the pervasive denial about class in our society, I don't think Reaching for Airwould ever have seen the light of day unless I published it myself. I was gratified when it was named a Finalist for the Best First Book of Poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters.

Caroline: What are you working on now?

Gayle:My second poetry manuscript is completed and looking for a publisher. The title is All the Wild and Holy: a Life of Eunice Williams, 1696-1785, a book-length narrative poem in the voice of the historical figure of Eunice Williams. I was pleased that it received an Honorable Mention for the May Sarton Poetry Prize by Bauhan Publishing. Currently, I am writing a series of travel poems to reflect my passion for travelling to learn about the world and other peoples in more than a superficial manner. Another project is to write poems about the pre-historic Greek goddesses who were worshipped before the northern patriarchal invaders arrived and destroyed the power of women that threatened the warriors.

I have a number of poems stashed away that I've long thought of as singletons. Recently I pulled them all together and discovered that about 50 of them could comprise a manuscript. Over the next few months I'll be revising these and writing a few more that fit into the three sections I've divided them into.

On a completely different tack, I'm excited about writing my first novel. Since it is such a different process from writing poetry, it is a very steep learning curve. But I am enjoying it as well as the frustrations involved. The story is set in the late 18th century in the Scottish Highlands, then, through many misadventures, proceeds to Iceland, and ends in the Boston. It follows the woman's journey based on Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. It is the first book in a trilogy.

Caroline:  Thanks for your time, Gayle.  I look forward to seeing your manuscripts in script. 

Caroline LeBlanc, former Army Nurse and civilian nurse psychotherapist, has had her essays and award winning poetry published in the US and abroad.  In 2010, Oiseau Press published Smokey Ink and a Touch of Honeysuckle, her chapbook about life as an Army wife and mother, and the descendent of 17^thCentury Acadian/French Canadian settlers in North America. As past Writer in Residence at the National Military Family Museum, she wrote the script for the museum’s traveling exhibit, Sacrifice & Service; co-produced and co-created the script for Telling Albuquerque and 4 Voices stage performances; and facilitated Standing Down, a NM Humanities Council book discussion group for veterans and family members. With Mitra Bishop, Roshi, Mountain Gate Zen Center, New Mexico, she offers veterans and women military family members day long Mindfulness Meditation/Mindful Writing Retreats.  She also serves as clinical staff for Mountain Gate Regaining Balance residential retreats for the same individuals.  Before leaving the Fort Drum, NY area, in 2012 she offered Writing For Your Lifeprograms to wounded warriors and military family members.  In 2011, Spalding University awarded her a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative writing.  Her art has won awards in New York and New Mexico.  She is a member of Albuquerque’s Rainbow Artists Collective, and a founding member of the Apronistas Collective of women artists who regularly mount community art shows highlighting women’s rights and ecological issues.