To follow up on Mary’s recent reading at Cal State (congratulations, Mary!)  here is part 2 of her interview.  I especially like her answer about inspiring creativity.

Lisa: Do you feel “exiled and displaced” from The United States?  What can a sense of exile do for a poet? How can it change a poet’s viewpoint or improve a poet’s writing?

Mary: I don’t feel alienated from the United States in any major way. I’m very much an American writer with strong roots in the American Midwest and South, particularly in rural, Western Kentucky. I’ve never wanted to live permanently in another country, but I have traveled in Latin America since I was in my early twenties, lived in remote jungle field stations, gone thousands of miles up the Amazon,  and spent over two decades living for months at a time in Brazil.

When you live outside the United States for any length of time, you see it differently, and you definitely experience a sense of exile. Simply speaking a foreign language much of the time exiles you from your childhood and your dreams. Also, unless you are bilingual, you appear to be less intelligent and less well educated than you really are.  As a foreigner, you constantly feel displaced. Small children correct your grammar. Little things trip you up. Once, because I didn’t know the word for “lentils,” I tried to make a lentil stew out of some sweet, tropical seeds used to make soft drinks. There are few things that taste worse than soda pop made with onions and a hambone.

Yet at the same time, there is incredible richness in such exile, particularly for a poet. Your head becomes filled with the sounds and rhythms of another language. You hear wonderful expressions and metaphors that don’t exist in English. Your perspective becomes global instead of national. You see your own country as a foreigner might see it, while at the same time feeling what it is to be a stranger in a foreign land. One thing poetry can do is make us see the world with fresh eyes. In exile, in a foreign land, you see many things as if you were a child again. Songs, animals, even the smell of the wind are all new to you. As a poet, you can take all this newness, this strangeness, all this sense of displacement and let it ripen in you until it emerges as a poem. After a while you may even find yourself dreaming in a foreign language.

Lisa: How can visions , dreams, fantasies, visions, and mystical experiences stimulate creativity?

Mary: All the things you’ve mentioned don’t just stimulate creativity; they are the very source of creativity. Creativity doesn’t begin with words or rational thoughts. It starts somewhere deep in you at a place where language does not yet exist and then  bubbles up into your conscious mind.  Depending on your religious beliefs, you may see visions and mystical experiences as hallucinations or as gifts from the gods. But no matter what you think they are or where you think they come from, they perform an essential task: they allow you to make unusual connections between things. In poetry these connections often come appear as metaphors, but creativity is not limited to writers, musicians, and artists. For example the organic chemist August Kekulé came up with the structure of the benzene ring after he had a dream about a snake seizing its own tail.

Lisa: Would you call yourself a mystic?

Mary: Yes and no.  As I’ve said, many of my poems come out of mystical/spiritual/visionary experiences. What I’ve seen in those visions leads me to believe that there is more to the universe than our brains can comprehend.  In fact, I’ve always believed that in many respects our brains have evolved to prevent us from seeing things as they really are. There’s simply too much information to take in. That world-beyond-our-world–or whatever you want to call it–is complicated and beautiful beyond our ability to absorb it. Any animal that saw the Greater Reality all the time would freeze like a deer in the headlights and be eaten by some animal with fewer distractions. So given these beliefs, I’m by definition a mystic.

On the other hand, I am probably the most rational mystic you’re likely to encounter. I don’t believe in many of the things you might associate with mysticism, and I have a long-standing interest in science, particularly the natural sciences. I read scientific journals, and I respect and employ rational thought.  Whenever possible. I like to reason things out. I have moved between  two poles–the mystical and the logical—for as long as I can remember. I even wrote my doctoral dissertation on 19^th century science and mysticism.

So while mysticism is the source of my poetry, rational thought is the source of my craft. I revise my poems in systematic, logical ways. They don’t just pop into my head. They are the result of a mixture of inspiration and a lot of concentrated effort. This combination of the mystical and the rational is probably why I am a novelist as well as a poet. Whole novels never come in a flash. They have to be written and rewritten, planned and re-planned. I revised McCarthy’s List, my first novel, all 350 pages of it, twelve times. I revised my most recent novel The Widow’s War, eighteen times.  Each novel I write takes from two to three years to complete.

Lisa: Have visionary/mystical poets like William Blake influenced your work?

Mary: Yes, definitely.  I am particularly fascinated by the way Blake combined his poetry with his engravings. There’s a haunting quality about all his work. Blake believed he was bringing us messages from another world. Of course his contemporaries thought he was stark, raving mad, which is an occupational hazard for mystics.

Part 3 to follow…

Poet and author Mary Mackey’s new collection of poetry, Sugar Zone, has just been released and she has graciously agreed to an interview.  I have chosen to break the interview into three segments to allow time to consider her responses and open dialog between Mary and you.  She and I both hope that you will join in with comments.

One of the poems that really touched me, The Drowning Boys, has been reproduced  in the sidebar.  I’d like to thank Mary for allowing me to post a poem with an ending stanza took my breath away.

Lisa: Why did you decide to mix English and Portuguese in some of the poems? Weren’t you concerned that this would put off readers who didn’t speak Portuguese?

Mary: The majority of the poems in Sugar Zone are in plain English, but I love to play with language,  I love the musical sound of Portuguese, and I wanted to surprise and delight my readers, so I decided to write some poems that contained Portuguese words. If you don’t speak Portuguese, the trick is to ignore these words or treat them as if they were a chant or an incantation.  I have made sure that every poem in Sugar Zone can be read as if it were written only in English. I proofread all the poems that contained Portuguese words twice: once with the Portuguese and once without it—so each of these poem is really two poems. On the other hand, if you do speak Portuguese or any other Romance language like Spanish, you’ll be treated to subtle levels of meaning which enhance and deepen the poems. Almost all the poems that contain Portuguese words are in the first section of the book and some of these only contain a word or two.

Lisa: There’s a mysterious character named Solange who appears in many of these poems. Who is Solange and why is she showing up all the time?

Mary: Solange is meant to be mysterious. She may be a goddess or a powerful witch, a muse, a lost lover, perhaps even an incarnation of the my own wilder side. There’s a spirit-like quality to her. Solange is unpredictable, full of passion, not afraid of danger. She takes crazy risks.  She’s very much her own woman. She’s a survivor. Solange walked into the poems out of nowhere. I wasn’t expecting her.

Lisa: Poet Dennis Nurske has compared you to other “visionary poets” of exile and displacement such as Henri Michaux, Sharon Doubiagio, and Lorca. Is this a fair comparison? Are you a “visionary” poet? If so, what does that mean?

Mary: I believe in coherence, reason, and craft, but I also think of myself as a visionary poet because much of my writing is inspired by visions, hallucinations, dreams, and brief glimpses of a world very different than the one we usually see. Many visionary poets (like the French poet Rimbaud) get to this state by using drugs and alcohol. I don’t use drugs; I don’t even drink. But ever since I was a small child, I have run very high fevers. When you run a fever above 105 degrees, you see things other people don’t see. You stop feeling sick and miserable and start feeling ecstatic. Perhaps it’s only Nature preparing us for a painless death, but having a very high fever gives you something that resembles a religious experience. I’ve found parallels to what I’ve experienced during such fevers in the writings of mystics like Saint John of the Cross and Saint Theresa of Avila. As with all mystical experiences, you can never really put what happened in words, but I keep trying.  My previous collection of poetry was entitled Breaking The Fever. In it, I also wrote about fever visions.

Such visions show up in my novels too, but not as often as in my poetry. For example, I wrote three novels about the goddess-worshipping cultures of Old Europe (The Year The Horses Came, The Horses At the Gate, and The Fires of Spring). All three contain dreams, rituals, mystical visions, and other kinds of direct contact with the Divine. I also teach courses in Women’s Visionary Film, and Women’s Visionary Fiction and Poetry.

Thanks Mary; Part 2 to follow.