ELAINE SEXTON, interview and introduction by Paul Guest

In the title poem of Sleuth, Elaine Sexton writes, “I become type on the page, Nancy Drew, / girl detective, solving mysteries….” How fitting, then, that Sexton’s poems often strive with the mysteries of autobiography, memory, history, and identity. Writer Paul Guest recently interviewed Elaine Sexton for Words on Walls about her first book, the writing life, and why poetry is valuable to her. Nancy Drew, ever intrepid, was unavailable for comment.

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PG: The first poem in Sleuth, “Crime Scene,” begins with the words “Nothing actual happened...” and ends with this figure of erasure: “When no one was watching I forgot, and forgot, / and the forgetting, eventually, became me.” Now, first poems are usually first poems for a reason. What did you want to say with this poem’s placement? What about your approach to biography, auto- and otherwise, in your work?

ES: In this poem, the self-conscious effort to be “present but gone,” sets the stage for what unfolds in other poems. In a way I might even consider Crime Scene an ars poetica, at least at this stage in my writing life, this poem exposes the origins of an impulse, offers a signal of how things began to take shape, how a consciousness emerges. The act, you identify as “erasure,” is an attempt to show the lining of that process.

I guess the question of autobiography is a big messy one isn’t it? Crime Scene is not what happened at a given point in time, but a frame for what happens, or might happen, or did not happen. One might ask why set the poem Ice Fishing on “Eel Pond” and not “Philbrick’s Pond,” for instance. Is it risk? Is it the suggestion of the subterranean? More than a few folks want to know: did the statue of the Virgin Mary really end up at the dump? in the poems, Sleuth and Totem. I’m not married to whatever part of an experience or setting doesn’t serve the poem, so whatever triggers a poem, what to keep, what to throw away, one hopes the energy and craft that goes into making something of it, justifies its use, and takes the reader somewhere he/she didn’t expect to go.

I think poetry, mine, and even the most abstract work, is an act of a kind of self portraiture, the language, the imagery, every choice one makes in a poem exposes something about the maker of the poem. Sometimes it is merely an aesthetic, but whatever makes a poem recognizable as the work of a particular writer reveals something deeply personal in the making.

PG: “A Tongue on the Road” ends with “She is what it takes / to get here.” What does it take for your poems to get here? What’s the initiating premise/idea/music for you?

ES: Interesting question, particularly because this poem consciously employs transportation. I originally thought I’d call the book: Pitch Forward because “getting there,” where ever “there” is, is often off kilter, and that is a big part of these poems. A Tongue on the Road offers a series of parallel gestures, that, when lined up, flush out … something that turns out to be: abstract.

I’ll try to identify what you call the initiating premise. Questions of faith press up from under the surface with some regularity in Sleuth, and overtly so in this poem. Here, this is illustrated in a series of encounters with gestures that take place in a church service: first, an overly overtly needy mother paws her child in a pew, then, the speaker attempts to comfort her own mother, drawing her close, while at the same time rejecting the mother’s faith. Then there’s the ritual of strangers embracing strangers; and finally, an imagined exchange with the toll booth attendant. The stilted language in the Mass “peace be with you,” takes the poem on a road trip, and a chance to, “go in peace.” This last is a simple and unambiguously metaphoric gesture, exposing all the judgements the poem attempts to tease out of the others. The toll booth attendant offers the poem safe passage into an idea. I suppose the premise, the idea is that the place we truly seek peace… is in our heads. And oddly, just as the poem eschews the body and praises the idea, “She is a summons,/ a siren. A chill in the night. Air/,” the metaphor that gives it voice returns it to a part of the body, the tongue, both physical/biblical, but in a kind of magic carpet way, a transport… to getting somewhere, away… (Gee, Paul. That’s a good question. I hadn’t really considered this in those terms… till you asked…)

PG: Now that it’s out, how do you feel about your book?

ES: Is it terrible to admit I love my book? It is seven weeks old today, and I can say right now, today (before any reviews are out, and anything terrible, I know of, has been said about it…) I love my book! I imagine I love it in the way a parent loves a newborn child. It might be a little ruddy in the face, but it is gorgeous to me!

I’ve been in constant motion since the book came out March 1st. On the advice of more knowledgeable friends, I did advance mailings, organized readings, book signings, I set up as many occasions to read as I could to give the book as much exposure as possible. So, it still feels very exciting, very alive, very new. As you know, launching a book at AWP is great because it is a virtual Woodstock of poets and writers, so I was able to get instant feedback in Baltimore, and warm up to the public face of the book from day one.

PG: What do you struggle with in your poems? What bedevils you?

ES: I have this mandate in my head to reject anything that isn’t clearly “fresh.” I struggle to steer clear of what feels like old material or questions I puzzled over in the first book. Maybe certain things stick with us our whole lives, but at the moment I’m attempting to not repeat myself, and dig deeper. I discard more and more poems that I ever remember doing when “Sleuth,” was taking shape. I’ve become consumed with the question of what constitutes an “original” vs. a “reflected” experience, for example. I want the poem, the language, to not be “like” something else. I’d like the poem, itself, thorough diction, syntax, music, as much as narrative, to make itself, the thing that actually happens. I guess this sounds so obvious. I mean isn’t that what a poem is? I just don’t remember thinking about what I was doing so self-consciously before.

PG: Can you describe the moment when you first found out Sleuth was accepted?

ES: Hmmm… well my face is one big grin contemplating that question. After the initial shock, the intense pleasure of the news, even before I picked up the phone to call those closest to me, I felt a great sadness, too. Like anyone who has lost someone close to them, I thought of my mother who looms large in the book, and who believed (I almost said…believes) in me. That’s one call I would liked to have made. In a way loss intensifies the pleasure to know that, even though sharing expands that pleasure, the recognition of something so intimate, and important, is ultimately personal, something you, alone, savor, and carry with you.

PG: Can you recall some of your earliest experiences with poetry and how they might have led you down the winding path towards becoming a poet?

ES: Like every child growing up in the 60s, particularly if you lived in New Hampshire, Robert Frost was a poet you read, and his poems were taught in school. So his are the poems that ticked in my head when I puzzled over contradictions and the everyday dramas I encountered living so close to nature, trying to put them in perspective, which meant, for me, giving them a shape in poems or little newsletters I would make and send to a pen pal. My mother played LPs of a craggy Frost reading his own work, and I understood early on that poetry was a grave business. I think lines like: “The shattered water made a misty din./Great waves looked over others coming in,/And thought of doing something to the shore/That water never did to land before,” offer a child growing up a block from the ocean, a very different reading, than one growing up in Brooklyn. I thought he was speaking directly to me. My mother had a passion for detail and a deep empathy for the underdog. Both of these qualities I feel I absorbed early on. She had a very limited formal education but traveled all over the world as a WAC and as an officer’s wife, living in Asia, Europe, the two coasts of the US, so she had a great appreciation for personal experience as education, as do I. She placed a high value on curiosity, and cultivated that in me. She nurtured my interests, particularly those that matched her own, in nature, language, the unsaid, and the effort it takes to get somewhere.

PG: Which poets do you value?

ES: Robert Frost, without question. Elizabeth Bishop. Frank O’Hara, immediately come to mind. Working my way back, of course Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson. I have a deep appreciation for John Donne. Contemporary poets I’ve learned from either their prose, or poems, or both are:: Ellen Voight. Charles Simic, Eamon Grennan, the Swedish poet, Tomas Transtromer. Value is an interesting word. I value the poets I studied with at Sarah Lawrence. I value my partner, Robin Becker, who is a fine poet, and critic. I value my contemporaries, and by this I mean the posse of friends and peers who I share work with, and who emerge from zero, along with me, from the first poem we recognized as good ... to wherever it is we are now.

PG: Can you describe your writing process?

ES: Dogged. Daily.

PG: Why poetry?

ES: The sound and sight of words excites me. I think language is visual. If I could paint, I’d be a painter. Words, like paint, are so, so satisfying to mix and push around, don’t you think? And they have a sound that paint doesn’t have. And though I’m not a musician, I place a high value on sound. Sometimes, color and images on canvas make sounds, but again ... it requires a gift I don’t have to draw them out. Words feel the most available to me, material I’ve had the best success making sense with.

I just went to see Woody Allen’s new play, “Writer’s Block,” last night. One of his characters said something to the effect that unlike people and relationships, “things don’t perish.” It made me think about my attachment to words and objects, things and what they contain or reflect in a poem, and how my poems are loaded with actual things like sea turtles and liquid mercury. This led me to thinking about words, in poems, as containing relationships that don’t perish. So, why poetry? you ask. I guess because it fixes something important, that can only be held in this way, something that would otherwise perish.

PG: What does new work look like? Is it a continuation of Sleuth? Or a break?

ES: I hope the new work goes deeper, takes greater risks. Some of the feedback I’m getting in is that the new poems are “darker.” Ages ago a friend called me a “Pollyanna.” I knew it was a kind of an insult at the time, but it is a comment I often go back when I work on a poem. I guess my impulse is toward the positive, but this is something I often question the value of, or the role it plays in a poem. Last fall I found an old copy of Pollyanna in the bargain book bin at a book sellers, and curious about the origin of the term I sat down and devoured it in one sitting. I had never read it or even seen the movie. A new poem called “Pollyanna Redux,” came from this reading, where the character rebels, and refuses to be used by the author as a vehicle for the greater good. So this, perhaps, signals a new direction...

PG: What is it like for you as a poet to work outside of academia?

ES: You know, at the moment it is fine. I have a great appreciation for academia, the years I spent getting an MFA gave me the critical jumpstart I needed in poetry. I had been writing what I thought of as poems, but completely in the dark, and without feedback or outside attention for years and years. It was striking how necessary it was for me to be around others who take this fragile enterprise as seriously as I did. I worked full time while I was in graduate school, and everything about my writing burgeoned once I started spending time with people who took writing poems as seriously as I did, as seriously as the people in my daily work life took launching a new magazine, securing an interview, nailing an advertising contract.

The world of commerce places a high value on “art,” only if there is a monetary interest in it. So, in academia ... at least as a student ... there is this luxury of ongoing appreciation for your efforts. Early on, even while I was still in school, I realized that community, for me, was a life line. I began gathering writers I knew to my apartment in the village, not just students, but any writer I knew at the time who wanted to meet periodically and read their work. Not to critique it, just to share it. I knew that leaving academia would leave a void if I didn’t continue to have contact with peers. This group has grown in the three or four years we’ve been gathering, and is now about thirty people.

My day gig is magazine publishing, and using some of these skills I’ve made a stab at documenting the work of this mostly non-academic crowd in a chapbook series. In this way, in or out of the academy, we share our work, forming a very loose kind of poetry collective. A chapbook series is the result. (you can see it on a Web site one of the group, Curtis Bauer, designed.

Elaine Sexton’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Christian Science Monitor, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, and numerous other journals. She holds an M.F.A from Sarah Lawrence College, and is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire. She grew up on the coast of New Hampshire, and lives in New York City, where she works in magazine publishing.

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