Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

My second experience, came during a summer I spent on a hippie commune in
Northern California. We had no electricity (and not much food unless you
counted vegetables from the garden and goat yogurt), so at night we had to
entertain ourselves by singing and story telling. It turned out that I was
much in demand as a storyteller and that the children in particular liked me
to tell them stories. This commune was as close as I am every likely to get
to a Neolithic tribe. (In fact, living there was partly what inspired my
three Neolithic novels: "The Year the Horses Came," "The Horses at the
Gate," and "The Fires of Spring.")

So to sum it all up, I believe that if I had never learned to read or write,
I would have still been a storyteller.
  

    

Kate's question about Kansas is more difficult to answer. I think what may
have been lost is exactly what Kate notes: a sense of familiarity. Seen from
a distance or in memory, Midwestern culture can seem as strange as any
culture on earth. Imagine for a moment that you have never seen lime Jello
salad with pears. Someone puts a dish of clear, brilliantly green, quaking
stuff in front of you with large, pale,  objects floating in it. What do you
do? Is it a window? A work of art? food? Do you dare stab it with a fork to
find out if you can penetrate the green stuff? Why has it been served at a
church supper? It appears that only women make it. Does that mean it is part
of some sacred female fertility ritual? Are you going to have to eat it? Can
you actually put something that wiggles like that into your mouth?
  

    
Actually, Mary, you may be drummed out of the corps for disclosing the
lime jello fertility secrets.

Ahem.  But you're so right.  Looking at it all afresh--being an
anthropologist in your own culture--is what poets are for us.
  

    

You are a consummate story-teller, Mary (I say that as one who has read   
 several of your novels and poetry books, and as a friend who enjoys your  
 ability to weave interesting and often amusing stories in 'normal' 
 conversation).  Are there distinct 'muses' that work for you in each of   
 the different venues (poems, novels, conversation)?
  

    
Let me ask a prosaic question of the poet: Difficult as it is to get
fiction published, to make any sort of living at it, to get publishers
to promote novels and the rest of the world to pay attention, to just
plain keep at it -- difficult as all that is, it's harder by far for
poets. Poets get less of everything -- advances, sales, reviews. How do
you summon the courage and energy, not to keep writing poems (I doubt
you could stop), but to keep collecting them, publishing them, going to
signings and readings, all the stuff you have to do to give them a
shot at being read?  How do you overcome the discouragement that must
set in from time to time?  
  

    

Hmm, distinct muses. I never really thought about that. In some ways, all my
stories/poems/novels/etc. come from the same place-that liminal point
between the conscious and subconscious. In fact, as you may know, the word
"liminal" comes for the Greek word for threshold, which is perfect because
when I get ideas, I feel that I am balanced between two worlds-one full of
strange, dream-like material, the other logical and capable of remembering
that material (which is important, because otherwise I would forget my ideas
the way a person forgets dreams almost immediately after waking). Yet in the
broader sense, I have different muses for different things. My poems tend to
come from strong emotions; my novels from an endless fascination with
stories; my screenplays from visual images; my conversation (and thank you
for saying you enjoy it so much) from a delight in entertaining other people
and making them laugh.
  

    

You're right that American poets live on the crumbs of the literary scene
(if they are even lucky enough to get crumbs), and it is very discouraging
at times. Anyone who writes poetry hoping to make money is, of course,
barking insane unless they've signed a deal with Hallmark. So how do I
overcome discouragement? Well, first I tell myself how much more fortunate I
am in every way than most people on this planet. I have a job; I eat
regularly; a great deal of my work has been published and well received; and
I don't live in a mud house infested with blood-sucking bugs that will give
me Chagas disease (which basically eats away your heart). So in this
respect, the travel I have done in Brazil and other tropical locations has
put the poet's life in perspective. Next, I find happiness in my husband and
my friends, not in whether or not people read my poems. Also, I've meditated
every day since 1975 (maybe missing a month total in all those years), which
helps me feel calm. In other words, I do things completely unrelated to
poetry so I can keep on writing without getting discouraged. When I am
really down, when someone has done or said something particularly unkind or
insensitive about me or my work, I remember Emily Dickensin, who had almost
no poems published during her lifetime. Half the battle is stubbornly
refusing to give up.
  

    

>Half the battle is stubbornly refusing to give up.

Boy, ain't that the truth?


I love your description of the various 'muses', Mary.  Thanks for thinking 
about the question!
  

    
Mary. That's probably the key to everything, "refusing to give up"  I
keep a picture of the Dali Lama on my office door in which he reminds
us "never give up". 

On a whole 'nother note. What would you say particularly distinguishes
your poetry from any other I might pick up?  What compliment would you
like to hear about your work?
  

    
Mary, thanks for sharing your time and your work with us.

I read your poem, "Agapanthus," that was posted in the poetry
conference on the Well. Perhaps because I am fond of agapanthus, I was
jolted by the poem; not a bad thing at all. I read it as an aesthetic
response, a fierce pulling away from beauty, which is then undercut in
the poem by the energy given to that avoidance, as well as the
descriptive energy, the beauty of the language devoted to the image of
the plant. You end the poem with a startling image, metaphorically
coupling the swaying stems of the agapanthus with that of cobras in a
mesmerizing sway -- the deadly beauty that retains the power to sway. 
Was that your intent in this work, to take this stand on beauty?  If
so, does it go beyond the poem, is it an artistic statement? 
  

    

What distinguishes my poetry from other poetry you might pick up? That, of
course, depends on what kind of poetry you are picking up. For example, I
like to play with language, but playing with language isn't my sole aim. I
strive to write poems that are moving, but not sentimental. I've had a
number of people tell me they never liked poetry until they read my poems. I
hope that's a good thing.

As for what kind of compliment I might like the hear about my work:
I would like you to say that my poetry is beautifully written, accessible
yet complex, and that it changed your life in some way, perhaps only in a
small way, but changed you so that you see the world around you a little
differently. After that, I would want you do exactly what all of you have
been doing: reading the poems and talking about them with me.
  

    

Therese has asked a very profound question about "Agapanthus". There is
indeed an artistic statement in this poem. I have always intensely disliked
Keat's much quoted lines from "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "Beauty is truth,
truth beauty"---that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." That
statement is a dangerous lie. Many evil  things are beautiful. "Triumph of
the Will," for example, is a beautiful movie. Caligula was by all accounts
an unusually handsome man. However, it's also good to remember that ugliness
is not truth either. In "Agapanthus" the beauty of the garden leads the
reader to believe that the poem is going to be about something good-love,
perhaps or spiritual clarity. Instead, it's about lies.
  

    
Agree about Keats.  

The image of the agapanthus as cobra is startling yet wonderful too. 
Cobras, after all, are not evil--they are just, well, cobras, doing
what cobras do.  I sometimes feel that lies take place in the interior
more than they come from the exterior.  (It was evil for our president
to lie to us, but it was perhaps more evil for people to suspend their
disbelief, believe his lies despite all evidence.  A minority position,
I guess; not one I've thought through very deeply.)  But I probably
wouldn't have thought about it at all without your poem, so yes, it has
changed me.
  

    
For those of you without a copy of Breaking the Fever. Here is the
poem we are talking about.
  

    
Agapanthus
      Mary Mackey (from Breaking the Fever)

They blossom
every August
like the stripped
skeletons of 
blue umbrellas

how I hate them
those goddamn
beautiful
merciless flowers

bring me nettles
or a bouquet
of poison oak
plant brambles
on my grave
but never
make me sit
in a morning-wet
garden
and listen
to two
blue-eyed men
telling lies
while a dozen
agapanthus
on long green stems
sway slowly
at my knees
like cobras
begging for
a kiss
  

    
I love that poem. It really scares me. Not, I think, of evil, but of
clear, impersonal danger. As beauty often is. Nothing personal dear,
but you're dead.

Mary do your poems ever change on you? I mean have you written a poem
that meant one thing when you wrote it and then later, even 10 years
later, you realized that it meant something completely different? Have
your own poems surprised you like that?  (I know our human children
turn out to be different than we intended.) Can you give an example.
  

    
I'll never look at flowers in the same way again. 
  

    

I think you can still trust violets and pansies, Robert.

As for rubi's question: My very first novel, "Immersion" (which might be
better described as a "novella" since it is under a hundred pages), changed
on me in a very surprising way. It was a feminist novel about the
destruction of the rainforest, written in 1968 at a time when people were
still not sure if ecology was spelled with a "c" or a "k". It was also, as
far as my editor can determine, the first feminist novel published by a
Second Wave feminist press. In other words, it was at the very least fifteen
years ahead of its time, and thus was greeted with bewilderment by  almost
everyone who read it. Now almost all the issues and ideas I raised in
"Immersion" are mainstream. It has been strange to watch this happen, but
stranger still is the fact that when I recently reread it (I am thinking of
taking up the Authors Guild's offer to allow me to reprint it through
backinprint.com), I realized it was filled with images of traps, nets, and
suffocation. When I wrote "Immersion", I had no idea I was creating such a
relentless atmosphere of claustrophobia. I was in a very unhappy
relationship at the time, but I did not yet consciously know that I wanted
to get out. It appears some part of me did know.

I've never had a poem change on me like this, but "Immersion" is a very
poetic novel, full of metaphor and images of transformation.
  

    
(I want to step in and say a brief word in defense of Keats--I'm not sure 
I can defend his strange & famous equation, but he doesn't say "beauty is 
goodness, goodness beauty;" he says "beauty is truth, truth beauty." The 
first is patently untrue; the second is more interesting, at least to me.)

It's very interesting to me that you can go back and see an early novel as 
more self-revealing than you knew then. I wonder what your most recent 
novel will show you in twenty years?

And for someone (me!) who has never read your novels--is there one you'd 
recommend I start with?
  

    
I certainly have a recommendation or two! Right beside me on my shelf.
 But I'll wait to see where Mary would start you. I think both sides
of truth/beauty; beauty/truth is interesting. True? Who knows true? But
very, very interesting. I've often heard the opposite: truth is ugly.

Here's another question for you Mary, from the outside word. A poet
friend of mine was surprised that your novel changed on you but not
your poems. Since writing poetry is more "liminal" than writing novels,
because poetry relies so much on metaphor, one might think that poems
would talk to us far ahead of reason. Far ahead if the specific
condition one is in when she writes.  My friend asks if your poems mean
pretty much now what they meant to you when you wrote them, then did
they resolve anything in you at the time you wrote them? Do poems "make
anything happen" in the writer? In the reader? In the world? "Does
poetry matter" after all? And can you give examples.
  

    
I have another question, in sort of a different direction. How and
when did you start writing? Did you know you just needed to do it, or
did it happen by accident? Did you start with prose or poetry? Was it
an extension of your enjoyment of storytelling? I guess I'm wondering:
if you wrote about your life as a writer, where would you start?
  

    

Which novel would I recommend for starters? That's a hard call, Kate, but
given that you are involved in the theater, I think you might like to start
with "The Kindness of Strangers" which is about the radical theater in
Berlin in the 1920's. Another good choice for you might be "A Grand
Passion," which is about three generations of women involved in ballet. The
only problem with both these novels is that they are out of print. If you
want to see what's in print right now, you can go to my webpage
www.marymackey.com  or do a search on the iUniverse.com website for me (by
name). Four of my novels have just been reprinted by iUniverse through a co-
publishing agreement with the Authors Guild. Of those four (which are easily
available), I'd say you would probably like either "The Last Warrior Queen"
or "The Year the Horses Came" best. ("The Year the Horses Came" is the first
book in a trilogy). Of course if you are feeling blue and just want to laugh
until you can hardly breathe, I recommend my Kate Clemens novels, "The Stand
In" and "Sweet Revenge."

So rubi, what were you going to suggest Kate start with?
  

    

Why don't my poems surprise me the way my novels do? I have no idea. As your
friend points out, you would think the meaning of a poem (to the poet) would
be less steady, more subject to change, but I haven't found this to be the
case, perhaps because I have always expected ambiguity in poetry and always
known that there are near-endless possibilities hidden beneath the words. If
I write a poem that only means one thing, I put it aside until I can fill it
with contradictory possibilities. Perhaps this is why I am not surprised
when I stumble across something new in one of my poems. It's not that the
poems don't change; it's that I see change as one of the essential elements
of poetry.
  

    

How did I start writing? As I said earlier, I told stories before I could
write. I grew up in a family where reading was important (my parents read to
us every night before we went to bed). My maternal aunt had had several
short stories published, and my father's mother was a Clemens (as in Samuel
Clemens). In the summer, I was sent down to Kentucky to the family farm
where I sat on the porch after dinner with my relatives and listened to
endless stories-comic, tragic, surreal stories, some of which dated back to
the 1700's. I recall one about a little boy who hid in a field of wheat to
surprise his daddy and got bailed by the bailer. I can still hear my uncle
Wid saying: "Wap! wap! that wire jest coiled around him and cut him to
snippets!" Tell a five-year-old stories like that, and you are either going
to produce a writer or a psycho-killer. I went with writer.

I never remember a time when I didn't want to be a writer, but I date my
first really serious plunge into poetry from a geometry lesson I had in
school when I was eleven. I was so fascinated by the regularity and beauty
of geometric forms, that I wrote fifteen poems about geometric shapes in
nature. The poems weren't very good, but I kept on writing and kept trying
to get better.
  

    
You hit exactly where I would, Mary. I would recommend "The Last
Warrior Queen" and "The Year the Horses Came". In fact, I just bought
those two to give as Christmas gifts.

I just love your pointing out the relation of poetry and geometry,
Mary. It's the regularity and elegance of poetry that attracts me also.
That brings me to a question of how you write. You mentioned how poems
come to you, the explosion. Then what happens. Does it take many
revisions? Do you do a lot of revisions? And how do you know when a
poem is finished?