Here is the final piece of the recent interview with Mary about her new collection of poetry, The Sugar Zone.  It has been a privelege to talk with Mary again, and I’ve enjoyed the comments that have come in, especially the ones about the value of language.  It has made me think about how that can be translated to the page.  Thank you Mary, for your graciousness in allowing this interview.

Lisa: The poems in Sugar Zone contain enough stories for 50 novels. Do these stories come from your own life? Have you really been under machine gun fire in Colombia, driven through riots where people threw burning palm trees onto the highway, experienced a volcanic eruption, and nearly been drowned by a pack of young children who were trying to steal your watch?

 Mary: Yes, all those things happened to me and more. In fact, something always seems to happen to me when I travel, perhaps because I rarely travel like a tourist. I’m more likely to find myself staying in a place with a thatched roof than a good hotel or eating something strange like iguana stew rather than hamburger. I don’t seek out danger out, but it finds me: I get crawled over by army ants, a rabid bat tries to sneak into my sleeping bag, I nearly step on a nine foot pit viper. Any number of biologists who work in the tropics can tell similar stories, but few poets regularly venture so far from the margins of civilization.  Of all the things that have happened to me, the worst was having an illiterate fifteen-year-old soldier hold my passport upside down and try to read it while pointing a machine gun at me, safety catch off.

Lisa: Do you think all writers need to be willing to take risks?

Mary: Yes. To write well, you need to have something to write about besides writing. This means you need live life to the fullest, and to do that you need to be willing to step outside your comfort zone and confront experiences head-on. How you take risks depends on what kind of writer you are. You can look inward and examine your deepest joys, fears, passions, and traumas; or you can throw yourself head-long into the material world. Traditionally, woman writers have looked inward or confined their writing to describing the domestic sphere—home, family, marriage, children. Jane Austin and Emily Bronte are good examples.  Most male writers have looked outward, taking passage on a whaling vessel like Melville or traveling up the Congo River like Conrad. There are exceptions, of course, but this has been the pattern.

When I was a young woman, I decided that I wanted to be the kind of writer who looked both inward and outward. “When I am an old woman,” I thought, “I would rather regret the things I have done than the things I didn’t do.” It’s amazing how few things I now regret.  It’s very scary to be in a volcanic eruption with stones falling out of the sky, but later you realize that you have been given a rare, powerful experience that you can use in your writing. Adversity sharpens your wits and your intellect. Even when things seem to be going from bad to worse, you can whisper to yourself: This is great material. If I survive, I’m going to write about it someday. 

Lisa: Poet and novelist Marge Piercy has called the poems in Sugar Zone “death haunted poems.” Why do so many  poets write about death? Why did you? Can you give us some examples of poems from Sugar Zone that are death-haunted?

Mary: The four poems in Sugar Zone that deal with death most directly are The Night You Never Saw, Cold Snap, Nightlight, and Absolution. Yet there are also poems that are funny, poems about lovers and passion, poems about the beauty of the rainforest and the surprising gifts you receive when you travel in foreign lands.

Lyric poetry—the kind of poetry I write—is about the great mysteries of life. Death, along with love and nature, is one of the three greatest of these mysteries. Poets write about death for a number of reasons, so I’ll only speak about why I do it. How can we—you , I, all of us—cease to exist? It’s almost impossible to imagine our own deaths and almost unbearable to experience the deaths of those we love. Both my parents died in the past three years.  I still can’t believe that my mother and father are gone, that I will never see them again. I keep probing that mystery, asking: Where did they go? Where do we all go? What comfort can we find? What is the moment of death like? How can the inevitability of death help us live our lives with greater awareness and compassion?  Is there anything after death? Poetry helps me come to terms with all these questions, and allows me to offer my readers—if not answers—at least possibilities.

Lisa: The poem “All the Way Down” takes a car crash and slows it down into an encapsulated moment of almost peaceful dreaming. You captured that moment of suspended disbelief within the terror of adrenaline perfectly. How quickly after the event did you write the poem? Was it an immediate reaction, the poem formed from the event, or was it later after you’d had time to reflect  and recapture?

Mary: I almost never write about things immediately after they happen. That car crash occurred  well over two decades ago. I can recall being fascinated by the way time changed and expanded in the moments before impact and how long those moments seemed. There was no sound. Everything seemed to happen very slowly, as if we were drifting through water. I had a lot of time to think, but since I wasn’t driving, I couldn’t do anything but observe. When the crash actually happened, I felt as if I had been ripped back into normal time. I screamed. I was terrified. But before that I felt nothing but a kind of long, peaceful contemplation of the possibility that we were all going to die.

Lisa: I like how your format your poetry, by adding extra spaces within lines. This adds a pause when reading out loud, an impact felt more than simple line breaks similar to drawing in breath. Do you write that way, or do you insert the pauses when revising or maybe reading out loud?

Mary:  The blank spaces are as much a part of my poems as the words. I put them into my first drafts, but later, as I revise, I often change where they occur. They represent places to draw breath when you are reading out loud. They are also places for your eyes to rest for a moment before moving on. You can think these blank spaces as small islands—as calm places where the you can enter the poem, pause for a moment, feel your own feelings and think your own thoughts. Just as spoken words cannot exist without silence, written words cannot exist without the page that surrounds them.

I’d like to close this interview by asking readers to look again at the last sentence in Mary’s interview.  The written word cannot exist without the page that surrounds them.  I’m going to have to ponder that for a while.

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…