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KeepWriting editor, Aaron Gilbert, sits down with editor, professor, and poet Elizabeth Spires in her office at Goucher College, where she holds a chair for distinguished achievement. Ms. Spires has published six books of poetry and four books for children. [View her profile]

Let’s start simple, pen or pencil?

If I have an idea for a poem and no pen is nearby, I’ll write in pencil. It may just be a thought, a phrase, or an image, or something really prosy. The first draft of a poem is so rough you wouldn’t be able to tell it was a poem. And then I type it on my laptop. I use a word processor the same way I used to use a typewriter. I print out the draft, then write changes all over the page, crossing out and adding words, lines, and phrases. I may do several drafts in a morning and then let a day go by. Then I type in all my changes and print the poem out again.

I always print out paper drafts. I’ve found sometimes that when I’m having a problem with a poem, that if I go back to an earlier, rougher draft, I’ll sometimes see things I discarded that I shouldn’t have. Early drafts sometimes remind me of what my original intention was. They can help me understand why something isn’t working, why the poem isn’t richer.

When do you write?

Lately my routine has been interrupted quite a bit, but, ideally, I like to write in the morning, before the demands of the day intrude. In graduate school I wrote late at night, but I didn’t have to get up early then. But really, since my mid-20′s, I guess you could say it’s the morning.

You say interrupted, do you mean because of your job teaching?

Well, there are so many kinds of interruptions. There are family commitments, doctor’s and dentist’s appointments, literary commitments, and travel for personal and professional reasons. In terms of teaching, I ask my poetry students to write a poem every week so it takes a fair amount of time to read and annotate what they’ve written. It’s hard not to have interruptions.

Do you think there is an ideal age or environment for writers?

For me, I think my ideas came fast and furious starting in college. I can remember walking to class at Vassar — that’s where I was an undergraduate — and ideas and phrases and lines of poems would be going through my head. Four or five ideas for poems might occur to me in one day. I don’t mean I wrote four or five poems a day. Usually, I wrote — meaning, I finished —a poem every week.

In your forties, you may have fewer ideas, but still you have more than enough. I’m only speaking for myself. The trade-off, however, is that one’s technique may improve as one gets older. Some poets have a new flowering in their old age. Yeats and Josephine Jacobsen come to mind, to name just two. It’s pretty incredible when that happens, so one can hope!

You’ve published six books of poetry and six children’s books, and you’ve also edited two books by Josephine Jacobsen, have you written in any other genres?

Not unless you count book reviews and prose articles. I’ve written several extended prose articles on Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop and Josephine Jacobsen, longish overviews of their careers. I haven’t written fiction unless you count the fictional elements in my children’s books, The Mouse of Amherst and I Am Arachne.

Speaking of the children’s books, do you think there is a connection between your books for children and books of poetry?

You have to figure out what you can do; I’m not naturally a storyteller. Madison is a storyteller.

[Spires is married to the novelist Madison Smartt Bell.] Novelists are natural storytellers. So sometimes I gravitate to book projects for children that have a poetic element. I wrote two books of riddles that are told poetically [she produces two books, With One White Wing, and Riddle Road]. I know that poetry is my genre, and I’ve tried in some of these children’s books to really use it, because I’m not as good at telling stories.

Connected to that, I think you can be obsessed with a particular subject and realize there are different levels of complexity to write it on. Say there is an image in your head that plagues you, that you can’t let go of. Sometimes it would be possible to write it as a poem for adult readers, but it might also be possible to transform or disguise this obsession or compulsion and use it in a story or poem for children. For example, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame is all about adult neurosis as is Alice in Wonderland. But Graham and Carroll both figured out ways to write about adult concerns in a way that would appeal to children. Another way to look at it is that some children’s literature is for all ages, not just children.

A lot of your poems in I Heard God Talking to Me are in first person. I’m curious as to whether you are religious because a lot of these poems are speaking directly to God.

Well, I was raised as a Catholic and that was kind of intense. For much of my adult life, I really moved away from any sort of direct participation in any creed. But I think that there have been questions of faith or spirituality that have been with me throughout my adult life and made their way into my writing. Often people at a certain point, usually at midlife, move back into religious practice — its not like they get religion, but they move back into thinking about it more or attending a church service, or mass, or whatever. This is true for me. But I think spiritual concerns have always been under the surface of much of what I write.

So in writing this book were you exploring your own feelings or expressing Edmondson’s?

I’m really interested in first-person narration in poems. It’s a device that allows poets to imaginatively project themselves into minds or sensibilities that may be radically different from their own. I obviously relate to Edmondson, or I couldn’t have written the book, but his life, and approach to making art, was hugely different from what mine is. I’m envious of Edmondson because it seems as if his artistic inspiration never failed him. He attributed his creative gifts to God. He believed God gave him this special gift, and that the only thing that mattered was to use it. He was a free-flowing source of inspiration and creativity. He didn’t care about anything except making those stone figures. It bordered on the obsessional, but in a good way. For an artist, it seems to me the best life in the world.

Where did you first find Edmondson’s carvings?

He lived and worked in Nashville, and Madison is from Nashville. We go down to Nashville several times a year, and that’s where many of Edmondson’s carvings still are. I first saw a roomful of Edmondson figures at the Cheekwood Museum in Nashville, and then later met various private collectors who owned pieces by Edmondson. I loved his work from the very beginning. It’s that kind of wordless bond or kinship you feel with certain things.

Did you have the idea for the book before you started writing the poems?

I thought Edmondson’s stone figures would appeal to children as well as adults. I didn’t want to write a biography of Edmondson for young readers because its hard to make a biography lively and surprising unless the subject had an outwardly exciting life. I wanted to come up with some way of doing it that would involve the reader more so I decided to write a series monologues in which Edmondson and his creations speak.

The three poems at the beginning and the one at the end of the book are Edmondson’s own words. I went through microfilm of Nashville newspapers from the 1930s and found interviews with Edmondson. I pulled out things that he said about art and inspiration and collaged them together – it’s mentioned in the book that these are Edmondson’s own words. I thought it was important to let him speak and not to speak for him.

You’ve mentioned Madison twice now, let’s address him. You’re married to Madison Smartt Bell, he’s published thirteen novels and two collections of short stories. Are your writing lives intertwined or kept separated?

We basically do not collaborate. Everything is very, very separate. We tried once to collaborate. We were asked to write the libretto for an opera about the Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture so we did do that one summer, but I didn’t enjoy it at all, probably less than Madison did. I thought we were going to work on the text together and bat things back and forth, but Madison didn’t want to do it that way. So we ended up working on it separately.

We have separate studies on different floors in our house. We never write a draft of something and show it to the other person to get their feedback and then run back into our separate studies and work on it some more. It’s the opposite of that. If Madison is working on a novel, I don’t want to read it chapter by chapter. And I wouldn’t ask him to read a half-finished poem. You have to preserve mental space. We both feel that way.

You’re both well-published and well-awarded. Has your writing changed as a result of this success?

I don’t think that any sort of success has ever changed my writing or my approach to writing. If my writing has changed, which I think it has, it’s because I’ve changed as I’ve moved through the years and decades of my adult life. Experience — for example, the experience of having a child — changes a person. But an award or a book wouldn’t make me think I should write in a certain way because it’s worked out well before.

I’ve always wanted my writing to keep evolving, to find new subjects to explore and new ways to write about those subjects. Sometimes I’m working on a poem and I realize, this is just too much like something I did years ago. It might feel, unhappily, as if I’m writing the same poem only using different words. I don’t want to do that.

Getting back to your question, I don’t think there’s anything that could be given to me or said about my writing — good or bad — that would change it, because it’s the one place in my life where I can do what I want to without taking into account anyone else’s opinion [laughter].

I’ve only found very positive reviews of your work, have you found some that were disheartening?

Most weren’t terrible, no. Oh gosh, I think when my first book came out I got a really bad review. I was so young – I mean inexperienced – that I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach.

Tell me about your experiences as the reviewer.

If I review – it’s not often – I usually ask an editor for a new book that I really love and believe in. There are reviewers who write one savage review after another. There must be some sort of ego gratification involved. There’s not very much space in newspapers and magazines for books to be reviewed anymore, so I think editors and the reviewers should find the really good, interesting books

to talk about and ignore everything else. I know that’s an unrealistic, purist viewpoint, but I want to write about books that I really care about. I came across a quote by W.H. Auden, something about how habitually writing savage reviews is spiritual suicide. I can think of one reviewer, whose name I won’t mention, and that is his trademark.

You’re teaching an advanced poetry workshop at Goucher college, how does teaching poetry, creative writing, affect the way that you write?

I would reverse the question and say that my writing deeply affects my teaching. Almost everything I’ve asked my poetry students to do, I’ve done or tried myself. It would be very rare that they would be given an assignment that I haven’t been interested in doing myself. Then I try to give my students detailed feedback, both in terms of line-editing their poems, and then stepping back and writing a general comment that considers the overall premise and success of the poem. They get better, they really get better, when they have that feedback!

Teaching poetry is important even if it is not at the center of the cultural life in U.S. It makes students reflect, sometimes deeply, about what’s going on in their life, it makes them more conscious of their impulses and motivations, and it makes them care about language. Poetry really is the supreme form of communication. All those things are important, and I hope my students take their belief in poetry — reading it and writing it — with them when they graduate. We need to have some people out there who care.

So you edited two of her books and in the Wave-Maker you have dedicated “Curling Willow” to her, who is Josephine Jacobsen?

She was a Maryland poet, a great lady of poetry, who was really on par with Elizabeth Bishop but who has never received the amount of recognition that Elizabeth Bishop has. But really, a serious practitioner. I got to know her in the 1980′s. She was a friend of Rhoda Dorsey, who was president of Goucher then. It was one of those slowly evolving, deepening friendships. She was a fabulous person in every way. She actually has inspired four poems of mine. I dedicated two poems, “On the Island” and “In Heaven It Is Always Autumn,” to her. I was also thinking of Josephine in another poem “Two Chairs on a Hillside” which is all about a friendship between two poets. Actually, “Curling Willow,” of the four, is the one I think is not as good.

Her most recent book was published in 2008 but she died in 2003, correct?

Right. After Josephine published her selected poems, In the Crevice of Time, in 1995 (she was 87), she was still writing a few poems each year that appeared in magazines. Occasionally, into her early nineties, she would publish a poem in The New Yorker or a quarterly. She was writing one or two poems a year, but she was slowing down. So when she died, there was a small sheaf of uncollected poems. I knew there were at least 2000 readers, if not more – that’s how many copies In the Crevice of Time had sold — who really cared about Josephine’s work. And they were never going to have those last poems. So I collected them up, and now they’re in a little 32-page chapbook titled Contents of a Minute. It was published by Sarabande Books, a wonderful independent press in Louisville.

You’ve used her work in your classes, praised her in print, and interviewed her for The Paris Review; would you share a bit about your relationship with Elizabeth Bishop?

Well, Bishop graduated from Vassar in 1934, and I graduated in 1974, so we share an alma mater but with a 40-year span between us. I first heard about her when I was a student at Vassar, but she wasn’t a poetic celebrity then. Nowadays she is, almost, everyone’s favorite poet. Then she was a “poet’s poet,” one of the serious practictioners of the art who wasn’t wildly popular. Oddly, she wasn’t on any of the booklists at Vassar. I read some of her poems on my own, and I always felt like I was not quite getting to the bottom of them. At the same time, I felt very drawn in. It sounds weird, but I really wanted to meet her. It was the heyday of confessional poetry, when many well-known poets were very self-destructive and suicidal, like Plath, Sexton, and Berryman. Bishop seemed sane. She seemed like this incredibly brilliant, sane role model. It turns out that she, too, had her own little demons, but she kept them in check most of the time.

So I wrote and asked her if I could interview her for the Vassar Quarterly. She said she would see me because I had written her a polite letter and hadn’t sent her any poems – because so many people were bombarding her with poems constantly! But she said, now that I’ve met you, I’d like to read some of your poems. So I wrote an article that appeared in the Vassar Quarterly. Unfortunately, she died soon after that. I had all these tapes, six hours of tape, and later I turned it into a question-and- answer interview for The Paris Review. I love her work and have always been inspired by it. I’ve taught Bishop’s work so many times, and it always seems fresh. I don’t know what the magic is, but it always seems fresh.

Who else inspires you?

Probably people you’ve heard me mention in class like John Donne, George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yeats, Frost, Theodore Roethke, A.R. Ammons, Anthony Hecht, and John Berryman. I could go on.… There are really so many.

How has technology changed the way you write?

I think technology is creating big problems for some of us. I was talking to a friend of mine, the poet Michael Collier, the other day. We were talking about typewriters and technology. A typewriter used to be something that a poet used to write poetry (unless he or she only wrote in longhand). The only thing you could do on it, besides type poems, was to type letters. It had no other function. There was no little Pandora’s Box — I’m talking about e-mail — that was there saying, “Open me and see what’s inside!” And now I don’t think people realize the implications, but when laptops started receiving and sending e-mail, and then could also search the internet for information, this writing device that you were using became multifunctional in a terribly distracting sort of way. Most of these functions have nothing to do with writing and can take you away from it, time-wise and in other ways. It breaks your concentration. I’m thinking, and Michael was thinking, that we need to go back to an antique machine — the typewriter — that doesn’t do anything except write poems.

Could you ever see yourself using an electronic reader like Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s E-Reader?

The only way I’m every going to do that is if they stop printing books. I guess if I was on a trip around the world, and I was limited as to how many books I could take in a suitcase, maybe I’d start loading an E- reader with classics. But that’s a situation I don’t think is going to happen. I want to hold the book. I want the words to be on paper. I think it’s sacred, I really do. I think books are sacred, and I’m a little worried. Is there going to come a day when the libraries tell us they’re getting rid of all the books and digitizing them?

As poems hit you, when do you start putting them together to be in a book?

It’s normal for a collection of poetry to take me five or six or seven years to write. At a certain point, when I have 25 or 30 finished poems, I start trying to arrange them into a coherent whole. I’ve always felt in my mind that I have “A-list” poems and “B-list” poems. The B-list poems are the ones that didn’t seem to work out, that seem slight or fragmentary or superficial. But the poems that I do feel good about I include in a book. It’s a matter of doing the obvious, of deciding what my best poems are. I do it by instinct, not by some rational process. I have written a lot of poems that I’ve never included in a book, poems that seem weak or insubstantial. I don’t always know why. I just know something is wrong with them.

Do you ever get talked into using those poems?

Some of the less successful poems have been in magazines. A lot of them have never been read by anyone. In every book, after it’s published, I always feel that there are a few poems that I shouldn’t have included, but my books are pretty slender already. Always when I’m putting together a book ms., I wish I had four or five more really good poems so that I could take out weaker ones.

With the poems that I believe in, I keep trying to figure out an order that makes sense. The order of poems in a book is important. Sometimes a book works best when it’s divided into sections. I usually have some sort of thematic progression or narrative in mind when I order a ms., though it may not be immediately apparent to a reader.

With students, I try to help them with the order of their poems. If they’re applying to grad school with a sheaf of ten or twelve poems, even if it’s not book-length, they have to consider how to pull a reader in and immediately engage him or her. That can mean starting out with simpler, accessible poems and saving the more demanding poems for the end.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on new poems. They haven’t coalesced around any sort of center yet. I have an idea file for children’s books, and there are several ideas I want to think about more. I need to gather up some time and decide what to focus on next. Sometimes the ideas involve research, or finding an illustrator. I’m hoping to write another children’s book, but it probably won’t be finished this year.

Where does the money go?

It goes to those people writing the political tell-all biographies. That’s where the money is going.

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