 Your poetry is a chant to the spirit of life, criticism against injustices, an open attitude towards the redemption of faults and wrongs, you enter the poetic world with the freshness of youth and the charisma of a true mother, a mature woman. A balance difficult to strike that requires much emotional and intellectual involvement, would you like to talk to us about your steps in achieving such a refined completeness in your writings?
Well, that's such a compliment, I'm a bit tongue-tied. I remember at an early age, in my teens, wanting to be "whole." I was aware of the ways in which others, poetically and personally, split themselves into components, compartments, houses full of secret rooms, or how others may sacrifice various elements in themselves and others in order to achieve a narrow perfection, the cultivation of a particular poetic niche, a style or voice that is repeated, and how much of the ego's success depends upon this selectivity, compartmentalization, cultivation of productive aspects. I did not want to have to choose between
particular truths and it seemed to me that having to so choose was to obviate the possibility of truth itself. Perhaps too it's just that I did not wish to lay some part of myself or reality upon the altar of sacrifice or could not dismiss any gaze no matter how blackly it unravelled my own. So the emotional and mental involvement with many realities. This is not to say that sometimes it's not a terrible struggle, for the balance if it is there often seems to me a moment of grace or clearing between sometimes opposing and contradictory realities,
within and without, that have managed for a moment anyway to interweave themselves, without erasing or obviating themselves, or each other.
If I am not wrong you grew up in New Mexico and it seems to me that along with an incredible _probably_ self-erudition in the main Western literatures, you have treasured the territorial Indian knowledge which brings to your personality some traits that speak of the origins, wisdom, values, worshipping, & respect – for all.
My question, I think it would be interesting to know of your education, and of how much your life in New Mexico has forged your poetry, when, going back to your ancestors and from your father’s side: Seiferle, you stem from Switzerland.
Well, as a child, I grew up all over the US. My father liked to move and as a linotype operator he could find a job anywhere, so by the time I graduated from high school, I'd been in more than twenty schools all over the country. So my education was continually interrupted, without the usual continuities. And since my father was an orphan, growing up in an orphanage, there was this sense of being deracinated, of belonging nowhere and everywhere, a kind of placelessness that resulted for me anyway in a sense of always inhabiting 'somewhere else' an unknown other place. And, yes, my father's parents both came over from Switzerland, so there was always that sense of connection to a lost land, a lost family, about which we knew little and with which we had little contact. We would, wherever we moved, look for other Seiferles in the phone books and never find them. On the other hand, my mother was the child of dairy farmers in Colorado and they were very tangible, my grandmother and being at her farm when I was a child were a sort of vital physical presence for me, but that was "lost' too when I was about five and we began moving so often,
breaking those connections.
When I first went to New Mexico, I was nineteen and I felt that it was utterly unlike anywhere else in the US that I had lived, much more like a third world country in its poverty but also a marginal place, full of the ruins of the vanished Anasazi and other cultures, with a majority of minorities (the various Pueblo peoples and other tribes, the Navajo and the Ute, and the Spanish who have been in some areas since the 16th century), a different 'history' of America, the living tongues of other languages, and that landscape, the ancient bed of a vanished sea now exposed and eroded by wind and rain into vivid and compelling lines and color, as if the body of the earth were nakedly felt there, and then there's that sky, which is infinite, so often blue, and continually changing, so that one can see a cloud forming from the ground at moments or see the lightning and thunder racing blackly toward one and guess if one has time to outrun the rain, though given how rare and lovely and beneficent a presence the rain is in the desert, one more often runs out into the rain than away from it! So that landscape and all the realities that intersected and lived within it was a profound intersection with my own imagination and being, as if that 'elsewhere' that 'somewhere else' were there embodied, and gave ground to stand on and air to breathe to my work.
I didn't go to college after high school but just took a variety of jobs and kept reading, reading my way through the local library, and eventually got a BA in history/English with a minor in art history from the University of the State of New York by taking tests. So much of my education has been random and
solitary, autodidactic and informed by my reading and probably full of various gaps since that reading was driven by various passions and enthusiasms rather than comprehensive coursework. Eventually in 1989 I obtained a MFA from Warren Wilson College, a low residency program, and that was much driven by
my desire or hope to find some poetic company, since prior to that, I'd been living on nine and a half acres in the desert, hauling water, generating our own electricity, and raising my two daughters and tending to a herd of Alpine dairy goats and was very isolated, just reading and writing. I think most of my education has been reading alone and the odd 'educations' of various life experiences and the occasional and rare brief periods of intellectual and poetic engagement with others.
This is a moving answer Rebecca, and thank you for it. Since I also had my relatively lonely period (about 10 years at my parents' house in a tourists' resort when tourists crowded the area for about three months a year and then disappeared) I am wondering how much you miss those moments in which reading was dictated only by your own interest, as free as it could be. Because I do miss it.
Well, yes, recently, since moving to Boston and having a much lighter teaching load, I've experienced the return of the delight in reading, and it’s made me aware that it’s been a long while since I had the time to read “dictated only by my own interest.” For a number of years, I taught at the local college and had so
many papers, often poorly written, to read, as well as a number of manuscripts I had to read and reply to, as an editor of The Drunken Boat, as a teacher to a few private students, that, at a certain point, it was as if my mind refused to read. I don’t know if it was the amount of material I had to read, or that, everything I read, required response from me. So it’s nice to have that reading space and freedom back.
And also a freer life, even if heavy, but much more in contact with nature.
Yes, living in the desert, hauling water, generating one’s own electricity, is intensely arduous, and there’s always this continual sensuous contact with physical realities, the sun bringing out the beads of sweat on one’s arms and turning one’s skin the color of lions, the soft voices or stabbing bleats of the hungry goats, the scratchy feel of the hay bale thumping against one’s body carrying it to the feeder. And then I had my two daughters, all those dear realities, the baby head against the pulse in one’s own breast, their voices
growing into clarities so startling I could only laugh at the truth within them. Too much to say in this, impossible to say it and do justice to those living realities. Nature? yes, but I guess I view it more as life in the body, in one’s own, in contact with other creatures and people, in the body of the earth itself. When I left New Mexico, as we were driving and the sky split open with this lovely brief pelting rain so that the air was suddenly full of the scent of sagebrush and chamisa, all the dust washed out of the fronds of the junipers, the blue berries like darkly shining orbs, I thought that truly most of the time in that isolation, I was in love with the earth itself, that there was some way in all that space and openness that the eye/I lived in the sky, swimming through its depths, but also like a hand falling upon the horizon, the visible shape of the earth.
It is also interesting that you had to move all around to the point that you developed a direct reference with your own intellectual and private world. And this probably explains the richness of your poetic imagery.
Yes, I think there is a way in which the experiences I’ve had are so private that they weren’t held in communality with many. Only one of my sisters and my brother had that experience of moving all around all the time and there is a sort of recognition of various realities that is easily understood between us. But what
was lost in all that moving was a sense of social continuities, the shared histories of community, the being part of an extended family or group, and what was gained was a sense of ambiguities, of being driven back into one's internal realities, of worlds within that corresponded to those worlds without.
And it is in New Mexico that you got in contact with the Spanish language to the point that your translations of Vallejo have won prizes and have been published.
I learned Spanish in high school. I’d finished all the requirements but there was no procedure for early graduation, so I took a lot of electives, three years of Spanish, two of French and Latin, but I hadn’t heard Spanish as a living tongue, a daily sound in the ear, until I went to Mexico for a while and then settled in
New Mexico. I was by then reading Vallejo, Neruda, and others in the original and found a correspondence between their work and mine, particularly in the physicality of their work, the emphasis upon the body of experience and a willingness to change tongues, to change utterances to fit it, so that I felt more poetically related to that Latin American tradition than to the Anglo/European one. Though there I was mostly drawn to Robert Desnos, Rimbaud, Baudelaire; the first poem I memorized on my own when I was 14 or so was a poem by Baudelaire in the French, so I was also drawn to that European, mostly French tradition. It’s curious, in thinking about it, that I was most drawn as a poet to poets that I had to read in another language, as if something about poetic utterance were another language, as if in writing anything, I were translating. I
didn’t start translating Vallejo until I was in grad school and wanted to write some annotations on his work and realized that I couldn’t with the then existent translations; that I would have to translate the work as well. So I began translating them. One of my mentors Susan Stewart told me, off the cuff, that I should translate Trilce and since I’ve always been susceptible to poetic suggestions, I took it up, though still postponing it, thinking it would be too difficult to find copies of the original text. By luck, while returning home from
Warren Wilson College, I stopped in Albuquerque at Salt of the Earth Books and there was a copy of Trilce, a Losada edition of the original, on sale for 79 cents, so there I was! But translating Vallejo, who is a very different poet than I am in a number of respects, has taught me more than anything about the fluidity and
resistance of language, about the cultural and historical weights buried in a word; it’s been such a long involvement. But I suppose part of the other languages is the other world view embodied in each of them, for much of my reading has always been in anthropology, history and mythology, and in art history, those different ways of seeing.
And now you are living in the cold winter of Boston, snow ice & wind, with your new duties at Brandeis University, and you were recently rewarded with a literary fellowship by the Lannan Foundation, a swift and unforeseen change in your life. Would you like to talk about your activities and possible developments?
Ah, you are right, it is a great change. Someone in the creative writing department at Brandeis happened to read my last book, Bitters, and wrote to ask if I'd be interested in a residency. And the Lannan Literary Fellowship was the same sort of surprise. In some respects, it's odd to be living a poet's life, to be in the company and proximity of so many poets, in some cases to renew old friendships as when I went to hear my friend Jane Brox read in Concord and in some cases to meet those that I've known only online, like Mairead Bryne when she read in Cambridge, or poets and their work that has been previously unknown to me. There are so many readings and literary events in this area, and I've tried since I've been here to attend one every week or couple of weeks. I have also have an eleven year old son so we try and schedule regular outings, to the New England Aquarium, the Museum of Science, or walks to the outdoors, like a recent visit to Walden pond where we walked around the lake. I have one class each semester at Brandeis, a directed creative writing poetry class, and the classes are small and the students serious and engaged. I'm also teaching in the Stonecoast MFA program this semester with three graduate students via the mail and am interested in working with each of them, all very interesting writers in different ways. It's taken a while with all of the moving and finding a routine, including a new computer and new software, to get back to my own work but I'm hoping to put together a new collection in the next few months, to finish a collection of Lorca translations I'd begun a while ago, and to work on some Cuban translations for a proposed anthology. I've also been thinking about writing a book on poetics, in part driven by my reading and thinking in connection with the courses I teach, but that remains to be seen!
Thank you for your good answer, what about trying to let people here know what an MFA is?
An MFA program is a Master in Fine Arts, the culminating degree for students of creative writing. Warren Wilson, the one I attended was a low residency program which meant attending for a two week period of intensive lectures, workshops, seminars, and readings, and then working for the following semester with a faculty mentor (Ellen Bryant Voigt, Susan Stewart, Kenneth Rosen and Thomas Lux were my faculty mentors) via the mail. Part of the requirements were a long critical essay, in my case, written on Walt Whitman’s “Calamus Sequence,” and at the end of the program presenting a class and a poetry thesis, a book-length manuscript, which in my case, was Volte, found in the second half of my first book, The Ripped-Out Seam (Sheep Meadow Press, 1993).
And the following question could be on your The Drunken Boat, if you wish to talk of your activity and involvement with it.
Yes, I started The Drunken Boat with the first issue in April, 2000. We focus on poetry and poetry-in-translation. Each issue usually has an interview with a noted poet that focuses on a particular body of work, chapbooks by interesting new and developing writers, features of various publishers, sites, ezines that
focus on poetry, essays and reviews, and a selection of poetry with an international focus. I am particularly glad for the features of particular poetries that have been overlooked as when for instance our feature of Lithuanian poetry was described by Platelis, head of the Lithuanian PEN, as the best selection of contemporary Lithuanian poetry in translation available in English. During the last year and a half, given my moving and chaotic life situation, the issues which previously appeared quarterly have often instead been dual issues, appearing biannually. I am hoping to catch up and resume a regular publication schedule
in the near future, with the appearance of a dual issue in February 2005, though this has been slowed somewhat by the death of my old PC and my switching the files to a mac. I designed the webmagazine and do all the webwork as well as being the editor, so sometimes under other pressures I’ve not kept the
publishing schedule as current as I’d like. With the magazine, I hoped to create a poetic space outside of nationalities and also a venue that would favor poets following their enthusiasms. We don’t have the same limits on page space, the economic concerns, that print publishers do, and so web publication offers the
possibility of publishing work that is an exploration for the writer involved. I wrote an essay about this “Illuminated Pages” for the anthology on web publication, WithoutCovers://literary_ magazines@the_digital_edge (Purdue University Press 2002) in which I compared the web as full of the possibilities of Borges’ mythical library, and I still have hope that that’s true.
And finally the clue question I have postponed until now: about your writing, your relationship with writing, when do you feel you actually _started_ writing, writing in the sense of thinking of publishing, writing for someone who would be reading what you wrote.
Well, the first time I was aware consciously of my desire to write I was nine years old in the Vermont woods. My English teacher wanted us to write a poem about our favorite place and to do so in quatrains with rhyme and meter. My favorite place then was this spot alongside a brook where the forest opened up on the sunny bank of a meadow, ferns, a number of blond and green pale grasses, the blue fragrant stalks of the skunk cabbage at the edge of the meadow. There the brook curved and broke over a deadfall of pine into a deep pool. I can still remember being utterly frustrated, being unable to say anything of how I felt being there, of describing the way that the current undercut the bank and broke into a white froth on the other side, of the succulent shadows in the skunk cabbage, the weight of their heads that could almost be felt by looking at them. So I turned in my assignment, strained to and by its correctness, and the assignment was fine, but it was that sense of being so inarticulate, of being so unable to say, that made me feel how much I wanted to write. So it was that sense of failure, of being mute, as if I were dense matter under the skin, that made me aware of wanting to write. Though I promptly forgot about it! Then when I was 11, a friend and I decided to write a novel together; I guess as an extension of childhood games, but she had her hero and heroine and I had mine and soon our characters were vying for control of the novel. I went home and wrote a 100 pages! and so took over the novel. And through high school, I kept writing novels, finishing four by the time I was 18, though they were too character and plot driven and I hadn’t found a way to express my own sensibility within them. In the meantime I was also writing poetry and when I was 14, I decided that was what I wanted most to do, that in poetry I was writing out of that fundamental engagement. Prior to that, I’d planned to be a scientist, a biologist or zoologist, but from then on, I was always writing. I had some poems published in high school, a rock band wanted to use some of them for lyrics, and in my early twenties I had poems published in various magazines, but I don’t think any of those have survived. I was always periodically burning my
work, just to be free of it, I think my oldest poem in my first book goes back to when I was 32.
My relationship with writing has periodically changed, a change which seems to occur organically. Mostly I think of it as a verb, being less comfortable with the noun of being ‘a poet’ than with the verb of ‘writing.” Much of my work has been informed by various life experiences, for instance, in raising Alpine dairy goats, I learned rhythm and breath for them, in attending to their creaturely lives, milking them twice a day, being a midwife in the kidding season. Both of those are bodily processes that rely on touch and a kind of sensitivity to another being; for instance, impatience or too much pressure of grip is met by a swift kick, a hoof that rakes over the top of one’s hand. There were probably other experiences as well, the kid that would be born feeble or near death and how it was possible to try various remedies but at a certain point, a kind of acceptance, that to attempt more resuscitation would involve more suffering and with probably little result. I suppose it is relatively easy, in comparison, to let go of a written work after much revision that just isn’t going to ‘live’ upon the page. I think in many ways becoming a mother myself changed my relationship with writing; one of my children said once that she thought when she was little that there was another child in the house and that it was only later that she realized it was the poetry, as if it were some other presence I sometimes went carrying through the rooms. And my ex husband said on one occasion that he thought I was “unsuited for marriage” since I’d “always been really married to poetry,” which made me laugh, but there’s some truth in it. That is this kind of interwoven relationship with something else, something other, that persists. But then it did always seem to me that I could write anywhere, that writing poetry was not dependent upon any particular circumstances or means of livelihood but was a practice that could be practiced anywhere. On the other hand, this can sometimes be uncomfortable, for it is also at times as much a being absent, and so creates some difficult negotiations with life.
I don’t know, I’ve never written anything that I thought came alive from a writing exercise, so my writing’s always been impelled by necessity. Generally I put off writing something as long as I can, keeping it at a distance, until it overwhelms me or becomes that necessary. And I don’t think about being published or who’s going to read it, since, from the beginning, it seemed to me that those were both unlikely occurrences; that it could be possible to write one’s entire life and never be published or read. So even though I have been luckier than some writers in this, that’s never been part of the writing itself, but just sort of the business or luck that follows after, or doesn’t.
BIO – Rebecca Seiferle
Rebecca Seiferle’s third poetry collection, Bitters (Copper Canyon, 2001), won the 2002 Western States Book Award and a Pushcart Prize. She was recently awarded a 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship.
Poems from Seiferle’s previous collection, The Music We Dance To, won the Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America and were included in The Best American Poetry 2000 and The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia 2001). Seiferle is also the author of The Ripped-Out Seam (Sheep Meadow, 1993) which won the Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Writers’ Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, the Writers’ Union Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 1993 Paterson Poetry Prize.
Seiferle is also a translator from the Spanish. Her translations of Alfonso D’Aquino and Ernest Lumbreras are included in Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon, 2002). Her translation of Cesar Vallejo’s Trilce (Sheep Meadow, 1992) was the only finalist for the 1992 PenWest Translation Award. Her translation of Vallejo’s The Black Heralds is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in late 2003.
Seiferle is Founding Editor of The Drunken Boat, a quarterly online magazine of international poetry and translation. Her essay “Illuminated Pages” is included in WithoutCovers:/literary-magazines@the_digital_edge (Purdue University Press), a collection of essays on internet publication.
After many years living and teaching in New Mexico, Seiferle is Jacob Ziskind poet-in-residence at Brandeis Universty.
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