September 1, 2025 • 26 mins
In this collection of conversations, Ben Palpant, author of Letters From The Mountain, has compiled his intimate, one-on-one interviews with seventeen powerful poets of the 21st century. These conversations cover an entire range of life experience, including grief, hope, culture, the writing craft, family life, and the imagination. Each poet speaks with remarkable candor and joy. Taken together, these interviews are a powerful reminder that poetry remains an essential expression of what it means to be human.
Franz Kafka famously said that "a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." And the words and thoughts contained here aim to wake up much that has become silent in each of us. They contain wisdom that may inspire, instruct, and strengthen, confronting us with the reality that words matter, that poetry matters, and that we matter.
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S1 (00:00):
The following is brought to you in partnership with Oasis Audio.
Welcome to Rabbit Room Press Presents, a podcast series of
great audiobooks, one chapter at a time.
S2 (00:16):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Pallant. Read
for you by the author. Chapter ten Angela Alaimo O'Donnell
I have given the last nearly 30 years of my
life to education, and in particular to the study of literature,
so I felt an immediate affinity with Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, who,
(00:40):
like me, has given her life to sharing her love
with the next generation through teaching. Her passion for Dante
and Flannery O'Connor is so deep that she has written
a book of poems for each author, but it seemed
fitting to start our conversation by thanking her for giving
much of her life to teaching the next generation to
be a good teacher, you have to give your life away,
(01:01):
I say. Yes, she says, there's no doubt it really
is a vocation. When I read your work and your interviews,
you strike me as someone who loves fiercely and with
her whole self. Do you love intensely? Absolutely. She laughs
and says. My maiden name, Alaimo, is Sicilian. I love
with the ferocity of a Sicilian mother. Maybe that's why
(01:24):
God gave you three sons, I say. Yes, she replies,
and there's nothing that makes a Sicilian mother happier than
having everyone together in the same house. I'm constantly trying
to bring them all together, and I suppose that fierce
love is a bit of a besetting sin, because I'm
all in with whatever I'm doing, whether teaching, writing or parenting.
It's a little crazy and obsessive. So you're the kind
(01:47):
of person who squeezes 110% out of the 100% of
the time, energy, and love God gave her. Is this genetic?
Tell me about your parents. My father was actually my
mother's second marriage. She married a handsome soldier when she
was 17. Unfortunately, he was unfaithful to her shortly after
they married. She got a divorce, which at the time
(02:08):
was a shameful thing for a Catholic woman. My grandfather
did not get an annulment for her. So when she
married my father, they had to get married in a
civil ceremony which put her outside of the official church
because she was a divorced woman. But she remained a
practicing Catholic despite the stigma. I ask? Yes. She was
not going to give up her Catholic identity, so she
(02:29):
would dress her five children up on Sunday morning, and
we would sit in the front row of the church.
She was officially out of communion with the church, but
she went anyway. She had a lovely soprano voice and
she would sing louder than everyone else. But when it
came time for communion, she wouldn't receive the Eucharist. When
I was little, I didn't understand. Only when I was
older did I realize why she couldn't take communion. Years
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and years later, after moving to Florida, she called me
to say that her first husband had died, which meant
that she could now take the sacrament. I never saw
my mother take communion until she was in her last days,
when the priest came to give her last rites, which
must have been a moving experience for you, I say. Absolutely,
she replies. And she felt it was very important. She said,
(03:15):
the priest is coming. He is going to give me
Holy Communion. It was special to her. By this time
she had reverted to a childlike state. I suppose this
happens to all of us when we age. One thing
I've learned from time spent with dying. When you start
seeing your mother in the hospital room, you know it
means your life journey is coming to a close. I
(03:35):
have an unpublished poem about that somewhere in my files.
I would have to go digging to find it. Is
your poetry scattered all over the place when it's in process,
or do you keep it organized? I've developed a system
over the years. I keep a journal every day. I
write my poems in that journal and mark them with
post-it notes. I revisit them periodically and revise them. I
(03:57):
size them up and get a sense for which ones
are worth saving, and which should never see the light
of day. I try to write every day. Of course,
not everything I write is going to be a good poem,
but you have to keep the muscle active. After some time,
I will type up a bunch of poems that I
feel are as good as I can get them. I
print them and revise them on paper, adjusting words here
and there, and when they're ready, I'll send them out
(04:19):
to journals and begin assembling a collection, knowing when something
is worthy or unworthy. Feels a little arbitrary, don't you think?
I ask, especially to a young writer. How do you
know when something isn't good enough yet? When I was
newer to poetry, she says, I was less sure I
was lucky enough to marry a fellow English literature scholar
who is a generous and honest reader. I also had
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fellow poets as friends who would give me feedback. But
over time, I have developed my instincts to know when
a poem is good or not. For instance, I know
that if it doesn't touch me, It won't touch my reader.
Some poems just don't pierce through the surface of things
in the way I want. So that's one way I decide.
It still hurts when you have to toss a poem
onto the proverbial cutting room floor, I add. Yes, but
(05:05):
as William Faulkner said, you have to kill your darlings.
Some of those poems are about subjects that are very
near and dear to my heart, but as poems, they're
not as strong as they should be, and they end
up diluting the overall experience of my other poems. A
few years ago, I say my editor gave me helpful
advice about one of my poems. She told me that
I had taken her down a garden path, but failed
(05:26):
to take her to the very end of the path.
She felt like the poem was only half finished. I
pause to have someone who was not part of the
writing process, who didn't know exactly what I was trying
to say, but who had the courage and the instinct
to offer that kind of feedback was a timely gift,
I add. That's a great editor, she says. I once
had an editor do just the opposite. He said, um,
(05:49):
you go on too long. It ends here. It was
already a short poem, but he shortened it even more.
I laugh. Was he correct? Yes. I mean, I don't
remember what he cut because the poem has been in
the form he suggested for too many years. But it
was a much tighter poem as a result. Sometimes you
need both. Some poems must be shorter, some should be longer.
(06:13):
It takes a wise editor to help with that process.
I tend toward compactness, toward shorter poems. I love the
sonnet form because I love to work within those limits.
The form won't let me go on and on. And
sometimes there's a risk when a poem is too long,
I add of losing the heat the poem ought to provide. Yes,
she says, that is a risk. But some poets can
(06:35):
write really long poems and maintain the heat, you know.
Another thing to keep in mind when it comes to
writing good poems that keep their heat, is that we
all get into habits. Even well-regarded poets get into habits
of using certain formulaic tricks, you want to avoid making
the same moves every time, otherwise you will lose the heat.
Don't you think it can be difficult to distinguish between
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a trick or habit and what might be called a
poet's fingerprint, a mark of the poet's style? Yes, she says,
that's an important point. That's where readers are helpful, you know.
Once we release a book into the world, it no
longer belongs to us. So readers get to tell us
about our own work. They get to tell us about
our fingerprints. Sometimes they tell us things that we did
(07:18):
not see or did not consciously intend, yet they are
valid observations about our work. I recently read an article
I had in which the writer said poetry is meant
to draw us to attention. I get the picture of
a body and heart slumped in the chair of life,
only to sit up tall upon reading a poem. But
it sounds to me like you write to draw yourself
to attention. Maybe that's what resonates with your readers, because
(07:42):
as you draw yourself to attention, they are also drawn
to attention. You're right, she says. My role as a
poet isn't to shake people awake. That's my role as
a teacher with poetry. I attempt to say, hey, self,
sit up, pay attention, be alert to what's going on
around you. If I were to describe my mind as
a poet, it's like a rabbit, ears raised and twitching, listening.
(08:07):
You never know in which direction it might dart. On
the other hand, my husband says I'm more like a
bird flitting about, gathering pieces of this or that ribbon, twig,
leaf seed to line her nest. I suppose that's what
I'm doing with poetry. My material comes from all over
the place. Sometimes it comes from the natural world, sometimes
from memory, sometimes from popular culture, from a painting or
(08:30):
a song. I can't stop thinking about. All these disparate
experiences are crying out to be ordered in some way.
That's what poetry can do. When I don't write, I
feel very disordered and decentered. So really, I say at
the end of the day, you write to make sense
of your experience, not to tell people something that might
(08:51):
be the result, but it starts and ends with you. Yes,
she says, I want to remain myself, but also leave
myself behind. It's trying to get beyond myself to open
up vistas, while there is also this reflexive move that
requires the poet to return to his own life and heart,
to ultimately say what it might mean to him and
(09:11):
to us. Unless that reflexive turn happens, the poem is
less likely to have a life of its own, I say,
because it is more like an intellectual exercise than a
fully human expression. Absolutely, she says. Robert Frost says that
poetry is about the relationship between outer and inner weather.
So a poet can observe something in the natural world,
(09:34):
but he never stays there. What he sees must have
some meaning or impact on the inner weather of the perceiver.
To simply describe what you see is like a painting
by the artist and naturalist John James Audubon. It might
be pretty and decorative, but it won't likely move the reader.
The poet gives meaning to experience. The return to the
self is absolutely necessary. If what lies outside the self
(09:58):
is to have any impact on the reader and the
poet without necessarily explicating what you see. I add, without
getting didactic right, she replies. I read a poem yesterday,
I say, in which the poet was observing nature, and
said outright that she would impose no meaning on what
she saw. For her it was a virtue simply to observe.
(10:22):
It always starts with observations, she says, but I don't
think it stays there. I can understand where she's coming from.
I say we shouldn't impose our own meanings on things,
but because God made all things and because he holds
all things together, even what appears meaningless has meaning woven
into it. The meaning just isn't always obvious. I don't
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think a poet should impose meaning on experience, she says.
But I do think meaning still emerges. As humans, we
constantly look for meaning. Sometimes a poet needs to provide
the image and allow the reader to find the meaning.
I recently read a poem about a bird trying to
get a twig that was too large into its little birdhouse.
Just presenting the image was enough. Yes, I say, it
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opens onto various meanings for the reader. Right, she replies,
but the poet insisted on adding a stanza in which
she unpacked the meaning for us. It wasn't necessary. It
was didactic. That's a teacher's job, not a poet's. This
conversation reminds me of the psalmist, who spends much of
his time talking to himself. I say he's looking for meaning.
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He's finding meaning, but not just any meaning. He's trying
to see how God sees. The meaning is emerging, but
he's making sure it has a semblance of truth. One
of the hallmarks of the Catholic imagination is to recognize
that everything means something and it means it intensely, she says.
As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, the world is charged
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with the grandeur of God creation. Every single thing points
back to its maker. In that respect, every created thing
is a living thing, alive with the fire God put
into it. One of the poet's jobs is to note
that fire and to help us see it. I think
God has even given this gift to unbelieving poets. He
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lets them see a glimpse of that fire and wonder
in nature and the human heart. The best poets, regardless
of religious beliefs, have this sense that there's something greater
than us, something transcendent that everything points toward. Robert Frost
was not a terribly religious man, but there's no question
that as a poet, he saw these things around him
and therefore made them visible to us as well. don't
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you find that the great poets have a hunger for
something beyond themselves, that they keep pointing at that something,
even though they may not know what to call it,
I ask. Yes, she says. Something greater than us. Something
greater than our understanding. Even the best scientists have the
sense of things beyond our Ken. The language they use
might be the language of mathematics, but there is ultimately
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a sense of mystery. The best scientists are not materialists.
You need a great imagination to be a great scientist. Actually,
you need a great imagination to be a great human being,
because there's something inside us that cries out, that longs
to elucidate the wonder at the heart of all things,
at the heart of our deepest selves, so that others
can see it. We long to see things in light
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of eternity, to see meaning that is not time bound.
You're talking about the full gamut of human experience, I say,
which includes a great deal of hurt. So even in
our suffering, we long to find meaning and we want
to elucidate that meaning somehow. In your book, Still Pilgrim,
you say of your younger self that she knew herself lonely,
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didn't belong with the happy kids. Although you strike me
as someone whose joy bubbles over, there's much hurt in
your life. It seems to me that the woman you
are today has grown up with her roots in the
soil of sadness. Would you say that you are straining
light through poetry? Absolutely, she replies. Writing helps. It's not
(14:03):
an accident that soldiers who return from war are given
writing classes. It gives them an opportunity to articulate the
trauma of what they have experienced. Writing is an important
part of healing. We should do more of it. I
started young, maybe 5 or 6. There was a part
of me that really wanted to become an opera singer,
but we couldn't afford singing lessons, so that was out.
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But I could write poems. All I needed was a
piece of paper, a pen and a love for words.
I discovered that there was something powerful about recording the
things that happened to me. Those events became more meaningful
and consequential. Making poetry made me feel like I mattered more.
It was a tremendously empowering experience. More importantly, the poems
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redeemed the poverty, alienation, and darkness I experienced. Redeemed. I'm
assuming not simply by the retelling, but by how you
lit the experience, I ask. I'm thinking of Rembrandt and
the way he would light his subjects, impoverished or ugly
as they might be. Yes, she says, in some ways,
poets are myth makers, making intentional decisions about how certain
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events will be remembered without lying about the events. We're
imposing order on events by the choices we make, the
way we use language, poetic forms and all the tools
at our disposal. And that's important for the human experience.
Many of the greatest poems were born out of suffering
from an urge to make some kind of sense of it,
to create an order that will redeem the suffering. So
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it matters very much, I say, how we light the subject,
whether the subject is grievous or whether it's joyous. I
like to think of Saint Ignatius, she says, who illuminates
the full gamut of human experience. There are poems of
desolation and poems of consolation. Or Hopkins with his sonnets
of Joy and the so called Terrible sonnets, chronicling a
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soul that is suffering and feeling a sense of loss
and distance from God. We should write those kinds of poems,
and every kind in between. God not only permits us
to do so, but calls us to do so. And
the psalmists lead. In that example, I say you're reminding
me of a line by Seamus Heaney. I rhyme to
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see myself, to set the darkness echoing. I love that
poem Personal Helicon, because it depicts a child kneeling at
the edge of the well to see what he can
see down in the depths. he can't see much. And
what he can see is scary. A rat that slaps
across the water, yet he keeps looking. That's when he
realizes that although he can't understand everything, he can make
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songs that set the darkness echoing, which comes as a surprise.
I say a surprise and a gift. The poem becomes
a surprise, and even moments in the poem can surprise
the one writing it. As Frost says, if there's no
surprise in the writer, there's no surprise in the reader.
This happened to me with a poem called The Still
Pilgrim honors her mother. When I was a little girl,
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I used to watch my mother get dressed. It was
a complicated ritual in those days. So this sonnet is
fairly straightforward. Until the final three lines, which went in
a direction I didn't expect. The poem ends this way.
Her narrow waist encased in folds of flesh. Five pregnancies
leaving their mark in a world of rain. She was
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our ark. As often happens when I write in form,
I had no idea what the poem's final line would be.
I wrote the second to last line, knowing that I
would need a couplet to complete the sonnet, and there
aren't that many words that rhyme with Mark. Just like that,
the word arc struck me with tremendous force. Suddenly, and
without my engineering it, I knew what my mother had
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been for us. With my father dying when I was young,
with all of the sorrow and poverty. She was an arc.
That's a beautiful story, I say. I assume those kinds
of grace moments don't happen with every poem. But when
they do, they're startling. Exactly. You're right. They don't happen
a lot. I often think of writing poetry in light
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of baseball. My husband and my three sons love the game,
and we watch a lot of baseball. When you're a
300 hitter, that means you're really good. It also means
you're missing seven out of ten times at bat. That
realization always makes me feel better. Randall Jarrell says that
writing poetry is like standing in a parking lot, hoping
to get struck by lightning. And if it happens seven
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times in your life, you should count yourself lucky. That's
really funny, I say. I've never heard that before. Kind
of frightening thought, but pretty spot on, she says. Can
we talk about form poetry, I ask? Sure. In a
recent article, Abraham van Dongen mentioned that the word stanza
comes from the Italian for little room. That seems to
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me an apt description of your work. Each stanza plays
host to the reader, welcoming us into not merely an
idea or a statement, but a place where we are changed.
Do you see yourself as creating little rooms? Are you
decorating and furnishing them as an act of hospitality, or
are you creating beautiful spaces for readers to enter and
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commune with you? I love that image, she says. As
you know, among the Greeks and Mediterraneans, hospitality is the
highest virtue. The person you turn away at the door
could be one of the gods. And from the book
of Hebrews, how do you know but that you might
be entertaining angels unawares? My whole family is obsessed with hospitality.
To be inhospitable is the worst sin imaginable. Dante doesn't
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include the inhospitable circles of hell, which is problematic for me.
It's a major oversight. Am I allowed to say that
of the great Dante? That's funny, I say, yes, you
can say it, but I'll only let you say it
this one time. Thank you, she says. So I love
this idea. Yes. Each poem issues an invitation to enter
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the poet's world, to see what she sees, to be
together in this moment. They don't have to be large
and ornate rooms. They can be small and simple. I
would go so far as to say that each line
is its own little room, opening onto other rooms. I
love those lines from Emily Dickinson. I dwell in possibility,
a fairer house than prose, more numerous of windows superior
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for doors. I love the idea that a poem has
multiple doors and windows by which the reader might enter.
So in my poem about my mother, the word arc
invites you into the poem, even though it comes at
the end. It calls you to read the poem again,
but with new eyes. I think form is essential. You're
not very hospitable when you just cast a bunch of
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syllables onto the page in a chaotic fashion. Anyone can
toss words onto the page, but it takes hard work
to build something beautiful. When I was in high school,
I say poems struck me as random acts. A poem
was a riddle. They made me miserable. Even the poems
written in form felt like riddles which were fun to
untangle for those who liked riddles. But they still weren't
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very inviting. It seemed to me that poets were writing
something out of reach just to show they could do it.
I wasn't even sure they knew what they were talking about. Yes,
she replies, that can be frustrating. Over the years, I add,
I've decided that there's a distinction between poets who abandon
form entirely for the sake of being obtuse, and those
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who still hold to musicality without necessarily using formal structures.
That's helpful, she says. I also think some poets are
more oral and some are more visual. Maybe that accounts
for some of the differences. Some poets like to write
in open form, to see the poem on the page,
and to pay attention to the relationship between each line
and the negative space around it. For others, it's all
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about the images and the sounds. I'm very much an
ear centric poet, but I greatly respect those poets who
can write free verse as well. My tastes are eclectic.
I have a deep appreciation for a varied array of
poetry styles. Part of why I respect those poets is
that I find it very difficult to write free verse.
Over the years I've learned to go with my predilections. Yes,
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I say, though, these differences can create unhealthy rivalry among poets.
We live in a society of envy. We and our
children are catechized in the doctrines of desires that ultimately
destroy us and our relationships. Dante treats envy, she says,
in a unique and powerful way. In Purgatorio, the envious
are punished by having their eyes sutured shut. The punishment
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excites Dante's compassion because he can understand the temptation. It's
human nature to be quickened by desire for what we
do not have. As I say in one of my
dear Dante poems, it seems easy if you're blind, to
avoid the temptation of envy. So in some respects, the
person with his eyes sewn shut is blessed. We live
in a culture saturated by images. We're constantly presented with beautiful,
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desirable things. It's hard not to want them. It's not
just on television or billboards anymore. It's wherever I go
on the internet and social media, I say. That's right,
she adds. It's hard to be a human being amid
all that gorgeous plenty. My students have said that they
have to get off social media because they feel worthless
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when they watch the exciting lives of their so-called friends
play out. I mean, let's be honest, there's nothing more curated,
more artificial than what we put on social media, and
that's part of what sets us up for envy. It
devalues the normality of our day to day lives. Social
media is a different kind of myth making, I say. Definitely,
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she replies. Saint Augustine understood this when he wrote in
City of God that our desires are the seed of
our actions, and they need proper ordering. If we were
to live good lives, I say. Yes, she replies, I
have all sorts of disordered desires. My relationship to the
Amazon man alone says it all. I love the Amazon
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guy because he always brings me something wonderful. It will
make me happy. Then of course, the shine wears off
and I need something else. Dante would say that I'm
in Amazon purgatory. Ha! I say, well, I assure you,
you're not alone. I decided, she concludes, it was worth
writing a poem about that problem as a way to
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help me wrestle with my disordered desire. Poetry and the
act of writing poetry is a way of combating the
false myth making around us, and that we ourselves engage
in pointing the heart to what is beautiful, good, and
true in hopes that the poem may help others along
the way. First and foremost, it helps me focus on
what I should focus on. It has been that way
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for many years and it will remain that way as
long as I write. Here's one of my favorite poems
by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, the still pilgrim hosts. Christ. Christ
came calling one Christmas day. He brought us birds and
scoops of sky. His bag filled with fruit and buckets
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of rain. His backpack humming with hives of bees. We'd
never need honey or bread again. Or fish or olives
or homemade cheese. He set them all out on a
table he brought and bid us all sit down and eat.
None of us wondered. All of us thought how nice
of Christ and claimed a seat. He smiled as we
(25:24):
tasted each sweet meat. He told us stories and God
he could sing. He was the best guest Christmas could bring.
He stayed until dark, then left everything.
S1 (25:41):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audio book is published by Oasis Audio.
Copyright by Ben Pulpit, 2024 by Chris Baedeker.
The following is brought to you in partnership with Oasis Audio.
Welcome to Rabbit Room Press Presents, a podcast series of
great audiobooks, one chapter at a time.
S2 (00:16):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Pallant. Read
for you by the author. Chapter ten Angela Alaimo O'Donnell
I have given the last nearly 30 years of my
life to education, and in particular to the study of literature,
so I felt an immediate affinity with Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, who,
(00:40):
like me, has given her life to sharing her love
with the next generation through teaching. Her passion for Dante
and Flannery O'Connor is so deep that she has written
a book of poems for each author, but it seemed
fitting to start our conversation by thanking her for giving
much of her life to teaching the next generation to
be a good teacher, you have to give your life away,
(01:01):
I say. Yes, she says, there's no doubt it really
is a vocation. When I read your work and your interviews,
you strike me as someone who loves fiercely and with
her whole self. Do you love intensely? Absolutely. She laughs
and says. My maiden name, Alaimo, is Sicilian. I love
with the ferocity of a Sicilian mother. Maybe that's why
(01:24):
God gave you three sons, I say. Yes, she replies,
and there's nothing that makes a Sicilian mother happier than
having everyone together in the same house. I'm constantly trying
to bring them all together, and I suppose that fierce
love is a bit of a besetting sin, because I'm
all in with whatever I'm doing, whether teaching, writing or parenting.
It's a little crazy and obsessive. So you're the kind
(01:47):
of person who squeezes 110% out of the 100% of
the time, energy, and love God gave her. Is this genetic?
Tell me about your parents. My father was actually my
mother's second marriage. She married a handsome soldier when she
was 17. Unfortunately, he was unfaithful to her shortly after
they married. She got a divorce, which at the time
(02:08):
was a shameful thing for a Catholic woman. My grandfather
did not get an annulment for her. So when she
married my father, they had to get married in a
civil ceremony which put her outside of the official church
because she was a divorced woman. But she remained a
practicing Catholic despite the stigma. I ask? Yes. She was
not going to give up her Catholic identity, so she
(02:29):
would dress her five children up on Sunday morning, and
we would sit in the front row of the church.
She was officially out of communion with the church, but
she went anyway. She had a lovely soprano voice and
she would sing louder than everyone else. But when it
came time for communion, she wouldn't receive the Eucharist. When
I was little, I didn't understand. Only when I was
older did I realize why she couldn't take communion. Years
(02:52):
and years later, after moving to Florida, she called me
to say that her first husband had died, which meant
that she could now take the sacrament. I never saw
my mother take communion until she was in her last days,
when the priest came to give her last rites, which
must have been a moving experience for you, I say. Absolutely,
she replies. And she felt it was very important. She said,
(03:15):
the priest is coming. He is going to give me
Holy Communion. It was special to her. By this time
she had reverted to a childlike state. I suppose this
happens to all of us when we age. One thing
I've learned from time spent with dying. When you start
seeing your mother in the hospital room, you know it
means your life journey is coming to a close. I
(03:35):
have an unpublished poem about that somewhere in my files.
I would have to go digging to find it. Is
your poetry scattered all over the place when it's in process,
or do you keep it organized? I've developed a system
over the years. I keep a journal every day. I
write my poems in that journal and mark them with
post-it notes. I revisit them periodically and revise them. I
(03:57):
size them up and get a sense for which ones
are worth saving, and which should never see the light
of day. I try to write every day. Of course,
not everything I write is going to be a good poem,
but you have to keep the muscle active. After some time,
I will type up a bunch of poems that I
feel are as good as I can get them. I
print them and revise them on paper, adjusting words here
and there, and when they're ready, I'll send them out
(04:19):
to journals and begin assembling a collection, knowing when something
is worthy or unworthy. Feels a little arbitrary, don't you think?
I ask, especially to a young writer. How do you
know when something isn't good enough yet? When I was
newer to poetry, she says, I was less sure I
was lucky enough to marry a fellow English literature scholar
who is a generous and honest reader. I also had
(04:41):
fellow poets as friends who would give me feedback. But
over time, I have developed my instincts to know when
a poem is good or not. For instance, I know
that if it doesn't touch me, It won't touch my reader.
Some poems just don't pierce through the surface of things
in the way I want. So that's one way I decide.
It still hurts when you have to toss a poem
onto the proverbial cutting room floor, I add. Yes, but
(05:05):
as William Faulkner said, you have to kill your darlings.
Some of those poems are about subjects that are very
near and dear to my heart, but as poems, they're
not as strong as they should be, and they end
up diluting the overall experience of my other poems. A
few years ago, I say my editor gave me helpful
advice about one of my poems. She told me that
I had taken her down a garden path, but failed
(05:26):
to take her to the very end of the path.
She felt like the poem was only half finished. I
pause to have someone who was not part of the
writing process, who didn't know exactly what I was trying
to say, but who had the courage and the instinct
to offer that kind of feedback was a timely gift,
I add. That's a great editor, she says. I once
had an editor do just the opposite. He said, um,
(05:49):
you go on too long. It ends here. It was
already a short poem, but he shortened it even more.
I laugh. Was he correct? Yes. I mean, I don't
remember what he cut because the poem has been in
the form he suggested for too many years. But it
was a much tighter poem as a result. Sometimes you
need both. Some poems must be shorter, some should be longer.
(06:13):
It takes a wise editor to help with that process.
I tend toward compactness, toward shorter poems. I love the
sonnet form because I love to work within those limits.
The form won't let me go on and on. And
sometimes there's a risk when a poem is too long,
I add of losing the heat the poem ought to provide. Yes,
she says, that is a risk. But some poets can
(06:35):
write really long poems and maintain the heat, you know.
Another thing to keep in mind when it comes to
writing good poems that keep their heat, is that we
all get into habits. Even well-regarded poets get into habits
of using certain formulaic tricks, you want to avoid making
the same moves every time, otherwise you will lose the heat.
Don't you think it can be difficult to distinguish between
(06:57):
a trick or habit and what might be called a
poet's fingerprint, a mark of the poet's style? Yes, she says,
that's an important point. That's where readers are helpful, you know.
Once we release a book into the world, it no
longer belongs to us. So readers get to tell us
about our own work. They get to tell us about
our fingerprints. Sometimes they tell us things that we did
(07:18):
not see or did not consciously intend, yet they are
valid observations about our work. I recently read an article
I had in which the writer said poetry is meant
to draw us to attention. I get the picture of
a body and heart slumped in the chair of life,
only to sit up tall upon reading a poem. But
it sounds to me like you write to draw yourself
to attention. Maybe that's what resonates with your readers, because
(07:42):
as you draw yourself to attention, they are also drawn
to attention. You're right, she says. My role as a
poet isn't to shake people awake. That's my role as
a teacher with poetry. I attempt to say, hey, self,
sit up, pay attention, be alert to what's going on
around you. If I were to describe my mind as
a poet, it's like a rabbit, ears raised and twitching, listening.
(08:07):
You never know in which direction it might dart. On
the other hand, my husband says I'm more like a
bird flitting about, gathering pieces of this or that ribbon, twig,
leaf seed to line her nest. I suppose that's what
I'm doing with poetry. My material comes from all over
the place. Sometimes it comes from the natural world, sometimes
from memory, sometimes from popular culture, from a painting or
(08:30):
a song. I can't stop thinking about. All these disparate
experiences are crying out to be ordered in some way.
That's what poetry can do. When I don't write, I
feel very disordered and decentered. So really, I say at
the end of the day, you write to make sense
of your experience, not to tell people something that might
(08:51):
be the result, but it starts and ends with you. Yes,
she says, I want to remain myself, but also leave
myself behind. It's trying to get beyond myself to open
up vistas, while there is also this reflexive move that
requires the poet to return to his own life and heart,
to ultimately say what it might mean to him and
(09:11):
to us. Unless that reflexive turn happens, the poem is
less likely to have a life of its own, I say,
because it is more like an intellectual exercise than a
fully human expression. Absolutely, she says. Robert Frost says that
poetry is about the relationship between outer and inner weather.
So a poet can observe something in the natural world,
(09:34):
but he never stays there. What he sees must have
some meaning or impact on the inner weather of the perceiver.
To simply describe what you see is like a painting
by the artist and naturalist John James Audubon. It might
be pretty and decorative, but it won't likely move the reader.
The poet gives meaning to experience. The return to the
self is absolutely necessary. If what lies outside the self
(09:58):
is to have any impact on the reader and the
poet without necessarily explicating what you see. I add, without
getting didactic right, she replies. I read a poem yesterday,
I say, in which the poet was observing nature, and
said outright that she would impose no meaning on what
she saw. For her it was a virtue simply to observe.
(10:22):
It always starts with observations, she says, but I don't
think it stays there. I can understand where she's coming from.
I say we shouldn't impose our own meanings on things,
but because God made all things and because he holds
all things together, even what appears meaningless has meaning woven
into it. The meaning just isn't always obvious. I don't
(10:43):
think a poet should impose meaning on experience, she says.
But I do think meaning still emerges. As humans, we
constantly look for meaning. Sometimes a poet needs to provide
the image and allow the reader to find the meaning.
I recently read a poem about a bird trying to
get a twig that was too large into its little birdhouse.
Just presenting the image was enough. Yes, I say, it
(11:05):
opens onto various meanings for the reader. Right, she replies,
but the poet insisted on adding a stanza in which
she unpacked the meaning for us. It wasn't necessary. It
was didactic. That's a teacher's job, not a poet's. This
conversation reminds me of the psalmist, who spends much of
his time talking to himself. I say he's looking for meaning.
(11:29):
He's finding meaning, but not just any meaning. He's trying
to see how God sees. The meaning is emerging, but
he's making sure it has a semblance of truth. One
of the hallmarks of the Catholic imagination is to recognize
that everything means something and it means it intensely, she says.
As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, the world is charged
(11:51):
with the grandeur of God creation. Every single thing points
back to its maker. In that respect, every created thing
is a living thing, alive with the fire God put
into it. One of the poet's jobs is to note
that fire and to help us see it. I think
God has even given this gift to unbelieving poets. He
(12:12):
lets them see a glimpse of that fire and wonder
in nature and the human heart. The best poets, regardless
of religious beliefs, have this sense that there's something greater
than us, something transcendent that everything points toward. Robert Frost
was not a terribly religious man, but there's no question
that as a poet, he saw these things around him
and therefore made them visible to us as well. don't
(12:36):
you find that the great poets have a hunger for
something beyond themselves, that they keep pointing at that something,
even though they may not know what to call it,
I ask. Yes, she says. Something greater than us. Something
greater than our understanding. Even the best scientists have the
sense of things beyond our Ken. The language they use
might be the language of mathematics, but there is ultimately
(12:58):
a sense of mystery. The best scientists are not materialists.
You need a great imagination to be a great scientist. Actually,
you need a great imagination to be a great human being,
because there's something inside us that cries out, that longs
to elucidate the wonder at the heart of all things,
at the heart of our deepest selves, so that others
can see it. We long to see things in light
(13:20):
of eternity, to see meaning that is not time bound.
You're talking about the full gamut of human experience, I say,
which includes a great deal of hurt. So even in
our suffering, we long to find meaning and we want
to elucidate that meaning somehow. In your book, Still Pilgrim,
you say of your younger self that she knew herself lonely,
(13:43):
didn't belong with the happy kids. Although you strike me
as someone whose joy bubbles over, there's much hurt in
your life. It seems to me that the woman you
are today has grown up with her roots in the
soil of sadness. Would you say that you are straining
light through poetry? Absolutely, she replies. Writing helps. It's not
(14:03):
an accident that soldiers who return from war are given
writing classes. It gives them an opportunity to articulate the
trauma of what they have experienced. Writing is an important
part of healing. We should do more of it. I
started young, maybe 5 or 6. There was a part
of me that really wanted to become an opera singer,
but we couldn't afford singing lessons, so that was out.
(14:23):
But I could write poems. All I needed was a
piece of paper, a pen and a love for words.
I discovered that there was something powerful about recording the
things that happened to me. Those events became more meaningful
and consequential. Making poetry made me feel like I mattered more.
It was a tremendously empowering experience. More importantly, the poems
(14:45):
redeemed the poverty, alienation, and darkness I experienced. Redeemed. I'm
assuming not simply by the retelling, but by how you
lit the experience, I ask. I'm thinking of Rembrandt and
the way he would light his subjects, impoverished or ugly
as they might be. Yes, she says, in some ways,
poets are myth makers, making intentional decisions about how certain
(15:09):
events will be remembered without lying about the events. We're
imposing order on events by the choices we make, the
way we use language, poetic forms and all the tools
at our disposal. And that's important for the human experience.
Many of the greatest poems were born out of suffering
from an urge to make some kind of sense of it,
to create an order that will redeem the suffering. So
(15:32):
it matters very much, I say, how we light the subject,
whether the subject is grievous or whether it's joyous. I
like to think of Saint Ignatius, she says, who illuminates
the full gamut of human experience. There are poems of
desolation and poems of consolation. Or Hopkins with his sonnets
of Joy and the so called Terrible sonnets, chronicling a
(15:55):
soul that is suffering and feeling a sense of loss
and distance from God. We should write those kinds of poems,
and every kind in between. God not only permits us
to do so, but calls us to do so. And
the psalmists lead. In that example, I say you're reminding
me of a line by Seamus Heaney. I rhyme to
(16:16):
see myself, to set the darkness echoing. I love that
poem Personal Helicon, because it depicts a child kneeling at
the edge of the well to see what he can
see down in the depths. he can't see much. And
what he can see is scary. A rat that slaps
across the water, yet he keeps looking. That's when he
realizes that although he can't understand everything, he can make
(16:39):
songs that set the darkness echoing, which comes as a surprise.
I say a surprise and a gift. The poem becomes
a surprise, and even moments in the poem can surprise
the one writing it. As Frost says, if there's no
surprise in the writer, there's no surprise in the reader.
This happened to me with a poem called The Still
Pilgrim honors her mother. When I was a little girl,
(17:01):
I used to watch my mother get dressed. It was
a complicated ritual in those days. So this sonnet is
fairly straightforward. Until the final three lines, which went in
a direction I didn't expect. The poem ends this way.
Her narrow waist encased in folds of flesh. Five pregnancies
leaving their mark in a world of rain. She was
(17:23):
our ark. As often happens when I write in form,
I had no idea what the poem's final line would be.
I wrote the second to last line, knowing that I
would need a couplet to complete the sonnet, and there
aren't that many words that rhyme with Mark. Just like that,
the word arc struck me with tremendous force. Suddenly, and
without my engineering it, I knew what my mother had
(17:46):
been for us. With my father dying when I was young,
with all of the sorrow and poverty. She was an arc.
That's a beautiful story, I say. I assume those kinds
of grace moments don't happen with every poem. But when
they do, they're startling. Exactly. You're right. They don't happen
a lot. I often think of writing poetry in light
(18:08):
of baseball. My husband and my three sons love the game,
and we watch a lot of baseball. When you're a
300 hitter, that means you're really good. It also means
you're missing seven out of ten times at bat. That
realization always makes me feel better. Randall Jarrell says that
writing poetry is like standing in a parking lot, hoping
to get struck by lightning. And if it happens seven
(18:29):
times in your life, you should count yourself lucky. That's
really funny, I say. I've never heard that before. Kind
of frightening thought, but pretty spot on, she says. Can
we talk about form poetry, I ask? Sure. In a
recent article, Abraham van Dongen mentioned that the word stanza
comes from the Italian for little room. That seems to
(18:51):
me an apt description of your work. Each stanza plays
host to the reader, welcoming us into not merely an
idea or a statement, but a place where we are changed.
Do you see yourself as creating little rooms? Are you
decorating and furnishing them as an act of hospitality, or
are you creating beautiful spaces for readers to enter and
(19:11):
commune with you? I love that image, she says. As
you know, among the Greeks and Mediterraneans, hospitality is the
highest virtue. The person you turn away at the door
could be one of the gods. And from the book
of Hebrews, how do you know but that you might
be entertaining angels unawares? My whole family is obsessed with hospitality.
To be inhospitable is the worst sin imaginable. Dante doesn't
(19:34):
include the inhospitable circles of hell, which is problematic for me.
It's a major oversight. Am I allowed to say that
of the great Dante? That's funny, I say, yes, you
can say it, but I'll only let you say it
this one time. Thank you, she says. So I love
this idea. Yes. Each poem issues an invitation to enter
(19:57):
the poet's world, to see what she sees, to be
together in this moment. They don't have to be large
and ornate rooms. They can be small and simple. I
would go so far as to say that each line
is its own little room, opening onto other rooms. I
love those lines from Emily Dickinson. I dwell in possibility,
a fairer house than prose, more numerous of windows superior
(20:20):
for doors. I love the idea that a poem has
multiple doors and windows by which the reader might enter.
So in my poem about my mother, the word arc
invites you into the poem, even though it comes at
the end. It calls you to read the poem again,
but with new eyes. I think form is essential. You're
not very hospitable when you just cast a bunch of
(20:41):
syllables onto the page in a chaotic fashion. Anyone can
toss words onto the page, but it takes hard work
to build something beautiful. When I was in high school,
I say poems struck me as random acts. A poem
was a riddle. They made me miserable. Even the poems
written in form felt like riddles which were fun to
untangle for those who liked riddles. But they still weren't
(21:01):
very inviting. It seemed to me that poets were writing
something out of reach just to show they could do it.
I wasn't even sure they knew what they were talking about. Yes,
she replies, that can be frustrating. Over the years, I add,
I've decided that there's a distinction between poets who abandon
form entirely for the sake of being obtuse, and those
(21:22):
who still hold to musicality without necessarily using formal structures.
That's helpful, she says. I also think some poets are
more oral and some are more visual. Maybe that accounts
for some of the differences. Some poets like to write
in open form, to see the poem on the page,
and to pay attention to the relationship between each line
and the negative space around it. For others, it's all
(21:45):
about the images and the sounds. I'm very much an
ear centric poet, but I greatly respect those poets who
can write free verse as well. My tastes are eclectic.
I have a deep appreciation for a varied array of
poetry styles. Part of why I respect those poets is
that I find it very difficult to write free verse.
Over the years I've learned to go with my predilections. Yes,
(22:08):
I say, though, these differences can create unhealthy rivalry among poets.
We live in a society of envy. We and our
children are catechized in the doctrines of desires that ultimately
destroy us and our relationships. Dante treats envy, she says,
in a unique and powerful way. In Purgatorio, the envious
are punished by having their eyes sutured shut. The punishment
(22:32):
excites Dante's compassion because he can understand the temptation. It's
human nature to be quickened by desire for what we
do not have. As I say in one of my
dear Dante poems, it seems easy if you're blind, to
avoid the temptation of envy. So in some respects, the
person with his eyes sewn shut is blessed. We live
in a culture saturated by images. We're constantly presented with beautiful,
(22:56):
desirable things. It's hard not to want them. It's not
just on television or billboards anymore. It's wherever I go
on the internet and social media, I say. That's right,
she adds. It's hard to be a human being amid
all that gorgeous plenty. My students have said that they
have to get off social media because they feel worthless
(23:17):
when they watch the exciting lives of their so-called friends
play out. I mean, let's be honest, there's nothing more curated,
more artificial than what we put on social media, and
that's part of what sets us up for envy. It
devalues the normality of our day to day lives. Social
media is a different kind of myth making, I say. Definitely,
(23:37):
she replies. Saint Augustine understood this when he wrote in
City of God that our desires are the seed of
our actions, and they need proper ordering. If we were
to live good lives, I say. Yes, she replies, I
have all sorts of disordered desires. My relationship to the
Amazon man alone says it all. I love the Amazon
(23:59):
guy because he always brings me something wonderful. It will
make me happy. Then of course, the shine wears off
and I need something else. Dante would say that I'm
in Amazon purgatory. Ha! I say, well, I assure you,
you're not alone. I decided, she concludes, it was worth
writing a poem about that problem as a way to
(24:19):
help me wrestle with my disordered desire. Poetry and the
act of writing poetry is a way of combating the
false myth making around us, and that we ourselves engage
in pointing the heart to what is beautiful, good, and
true in hopes that the poem may help others along
the way. First and foremost, it helps me focus on
what I should focus on. It has been that way
(24:40):
for many years and it will remain that way as
long as I write. Here's one of my favorite poems
by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, the still pilgrim hosts. Christ. Christ
came calling one Christmas day. He brought us birds and
scoops of sky. His bag filled with fruit and buckets
(25:02):
of rain. His backpack humming with hives of bees. We'd
never need honey or bread again. Or fish or olives
or homemade cheese. He set them all out on a
table he brought and bid us all sit down and eat.
None of us wondered. All of us thought how nice
of Christ and claimed a seat. He smiled as we
(25:24):
tasted each sweet meat. He told us stories and God
he could sing. He was the best guest Christmas could bring.
He stayed until dark, then left everything.
S1 (25:41):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audio book is published by Oasis Audio.
Copyright by Ben Pulpit, 2024 by Chris Baedeker.
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