Celebrating Lyric Poetry
Stan Sanvel Rubin’s third collection of poems, Hidden Sequel, the winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Poetry Prize, contains this opening epigraph:
No, my heart is not sleeping,
It is awake. Awake.”
–Machado
Right from the start, in the beat between two awakes, we are roused as if by a hypnotist who is letting us know our time asleep has ended. Then, in the poems of his collection, Stan Rubin ignites our ability to glimpse all-at-onceness, what exists beyond our recognized sensibilities and well-managed day.
The first section of the collection, “The Door,” ends with “To Return.” In the poem, the repetition of the phrase “we returned” at the beginning of each of the three stanzas moves readers through a threshold and into the magic geography of the lyric:
To Return
We returned, all of us, in time for the last
fire on the Straits, the water burning,
the late sails burning, the islands
sinking in orange flames.
We returned, some of us rushing
inside, the pop and rattle
of cookery splitting the quiet
with the small mechanics of evening.
We returned, you standing alone
on the shore as if the silence, the waves
and the sunset were a single sentence
we might read forever, despite the night.
As I read the poem, I imagined the poet in a front yard, watching the “you” standing on a beach along the Straits of Juan de Fuca, because that is the water that travels west to the Pacific along the northern border of the town we both live in. I imagined the islands I have seen across the water days I’ve walked North Beach and the brilliance of sunsets there. I remembered how I hold onto the light, too, just before dark. And I remembered how, when caught up in family life, work life, and life with friends, I let the happy, busy din of life cover the bittersweet knowledge of mortality and immortality.
Through the power of Stan’s words, I was (to paraphrase the French poet Paul Eluard) transported to the other world I know exists inside this one. For a moment, I forgot the chores of time.
Happy to be reading the poems whose publication I had eagerly awaited, I asked Stan if he would do an interview for Writing It Real subscribers. After he answered the first round of questions I emailed, I sent others. Here is a transcript of our conversation:
Sheila
Knowing I am going to have an extended conversation with you about your poems and poetry, I have been preparing by browsing online to find more of your poems and more discussions of them. An interview that you did with Sheyene Foster entitled, “The Crazy Mirror of Language: An Interview with Stan Sanvel Rubin” interests me. In it you say:
I used to very much think of poems as spaces. I had a line somewhere that ‘poems are rooms we travel through.’ They are a kind of place. Maybe I once used to think of it as kind of a sacred grove or ritual space, and that it shouldn’t just be co-equal to life. That your job is to realize the sound body of a poem, the visual body of a poem, the experience of those words and possible meanings, so that the reader can experience it again and again in new ways.
I am taken with this description. Reading “To Return,” I know I feel perfectly placed in a setting on the shore, watching one of my group stand for the aloneness essential for capturing essence. I easily begin listening to the poem’s speaker and understand what noticing this kind of moment will do for me and for everyone who reads the poem. Reading the poem, I am returning to something of extreme importance to me, the affirmation that there is peace at the center of existence, despite the darkness. I am well placed in the “you’s” moment. I know it is my moment, too, because the poet noticed it and gave it a name I understand, “as if the silence, the waves / and the sunset were a single sentence / we might read forever.” I return to the moment as I celebrate the moment.
Do you feel that way about this poem? Do you still feel poetry is about finding a ritual grove?
Stan
I guess poetry is always a ritual for me, in the sense that, whenever you sit down to write, you are entering a different place, you are even entering a different time. It’s a time freed from clock time. It breaks that time open, frees us from it. We’ve all experienced this—writing, losing yourself in writing, whether it’s a lyric poem’s music or a narrative, or the recreation of a memory— suddenly someone knocks or phones or you look up, amazed that so much time has passed. Such transformation of time and space is one key to ritual. And I think for many writers there tends to be an order to it, a sequence of things, conscious or unconscious, that you do to make this happen. Taking the phone off the hook, where you place your paper, what pen and notebook you use if you’re not at a keyboard…all sorts of things like that to tell yourself you’re about to enter a different order of reality.
This poem does try to capture that feeling. It’s partly remembered, partly imagined, from many experiences. What it depicts is that moment I call “full,” when self and world, body, place, mind—all are in harmony. They’re at home. There are a lot of mystical ways to describe this, but I don’t need to bring any particular framework to the experience. The poem’s about what its title says: the comfort that we derive from the simple human act of returning. This can happen even at a place we have never been to before—when we recognize ourselves in it with that feeling of fullness. The images in the poem are elemental. There’s sunset, solitude, the sea. But it’s all a fleeting moment—because there’s also the others already inside, the weariness of the day’s exertions, the domestic work to come, the night coming on. Time won’t stand still. I think the last line probably says that the only way to hold on to this brief solace of timeless being is through language, through writing. That’s what I return to again and again.
Sheila
It feels like the sacred place of poetry is a place where you are free of judgment and open to perception and sensation. When you are writing, do you have to work at it to get there? How do you know that you have found that place and are, therefore, at the wellspring of precise, true words? Is that what it feels like, a wellspring?
Stan
You know it when you inhabit it by forgetting the rest. You know it when it inhabits you. I don’t think there’s any way to guarantee that. Sometimes it’s as effortless as entering water. Sometimes it’s struggle, with myself, with distractions, with words. “Well spring” is a terrific term, but maybe too important sounding. It helps to have a regular writing time and place. It never helps to sit down with an agenda, to tell yourself you’re going to write something important or even worth having written. Process is all. I love it, even the struggle, which is like continually righting yourself in a swift current. I think I do sometimes experience—and exult in—the feeling of being in the current, that something’s going right, that language is taking its own direction. I hope we all experience that. But whether the words are “true” is for later. There’s always work for later.
Sheila
In the poem “Variations in the Key of Night,” you write, “When you entered, shadows entered, irresolute as light.” I read this as meaning whether we are in shadows or in light, we do not know what is next, that there is not one pre-determined focus. “You did not chase /the night with a shut door,” is another of the poem’s observations and, for me, lessons. The you might be a spouse who disturbed the speaker by not shutting the door. The speaker, however, in the wisdom of poetry, sees that an open door allows in another dimension of the night, literally and figuratively.
In the poem “Night Light,” the speaker instructs himself to “assume the pose/ of a connoisseur of shadows.” It seems to me your poems are telling us that in not chasing the night away, we are open to more.
Do you think so? What have you learned from your poems?
Stan
I like your readings! Both poems were part of a sort of suite of “night” poems that provided the thematic structure of the initial version of the book. It’s a dark vision, but not without redemption. “Variations in the Key of Night” is very musical, using the seductiveness of repetition to welcome mystery—which might be erotic or even lethal, but is increasingly personal, as the night gets ever closer to the speaker. In a way, it’s my homage to Wallace Stevens, a poet whose work I loved before I understood any of it.
In “Night Light” there’s an ironic undertone. The first lines offer instruction on how “to remain asleep” by learning “to close your mind to riddles.” I see this as the opposite of welcoming the night. To become a “connoisseur of shadows” may sound appealing, but it seems to me finally solipsistic, the advice in the poem increasingly distances the speaker from a threatening reality. It has a reverse trajectory from “Variations in the Key of Night,” which welcomes the ambiguity, the other, the threat of intimacy and openness. Of course, the former poem is about imagination, an attitude to experience. The latter is about this violent world we’re in, and it’s hard to strike an easy, comforting attitude to that, isn’t it? A third “night” poem in the book, “Door,” is explicitly about the desire for the refuge of sleep vs. the awareness of war, history, etc. Yet it ends with an open door, a sliver of light that’s still possible.
Sheila
Yes, you end that poem:
that thin sketch of illuminated shadow
like rice paper burning,
that patch of nothing, that hole
in the night, that other doorway.
Sometimes all we can do is see “that other doorway” that violence throws into relief and makes us unable to forget.
You said in the Foster interview that one thing you want was to feel when you write is, “This is the true word that is given to me now; at this instant of time, so that I could be more honest about myself to myself than I ever knew I was…” Then, you say, “… I think I wanted a kind of aesthetic that I hope I still have in my work, that the words radiate possibilities. This does not mean language poetry, and it doesn’t mean vagueness. But it does mean that there’s not just one meaning for the word. That the word in the line catches up levels of possibilities that go along with it, like many tails connecting to a many-tailed tadpole, going this way and that way under the surface. So that if you feel more from the word than just its surface contextual meaning, you’re supposed to feel that. It’s supposed to ripple. When you get to the end of a poem, it sends you back to the beginning. That centers of energy radiate from some places in the poem, and that you can’t get to the end and have it and you’re finished.”
What would you add?
Stan
A poem wants to be a being in the world, as real as the world is, in its own way. Every word, with its sound and its exactitude, and its connotations, is terribly important to me. The intricate weaving of sound and meaning. I think a successful poem is one that isn’t done when you’re done reading it. Its words still ripple with life. They all connect. They call you back. It’s never the same poem twice.
Sheila
I certainly read your poems as a challenge to feel and remember that. I t think your poem “Candlestick” is an example.
Candlestick
Fits in a fist
illuminating
a staircase
which takes you
ever higher
into darkness
you won’t remember
later, when this
story is told.
Every time I read this poem, I think again of times I haven’t known where I was emotionally and yet after finding my way, I can’t quite remember what it was like not to have felt or known or discovered what I did out of the dark of not knowing. Your poem leads me to this perception so quickly, so economically. That is one of the beauties for me of reading lyric, rather than prose poems. Although this poem has within it the narrative of holding a candle as you walk upstairs, it places the reader in the lyric world with its opening repetition of sound, “Fits in a fist.”
Your five-part poem, “Laws of Silence,” though, uses fragments–the direct opposite of narrative. This time the lyric quality comes partly from the numbered parts that allow readers to piece the poem into its emotional occasion rather than let one continuous action wash over them. Three of the five parts use the phrase, “the way,” “the way glass in a stream,” “the way she is now, broken,” “the way a memory.” We are forced to consider scattered images to tell the story and the story deepens in us because of it.
Sheila
I can’t help but ask you what you feel about the label lyric poet? What does it mean in today’s age of prose and narrative to rely heavily on the lyric? How is that associated with the sacred space you looked for through poems?
Stan
I’m pleased to say that I’m a lyric poet. This has a lot to do with a feeling for time, as I said, but also with a feeling for the value of words. In an era when story and sentence are dominant, I work in units of the musical line. The music is meant not to be performed, as in the ancient Greek lyric, but to inhabit the reader, as it inhabits me. Some of the fun of poetry for me is that you get to work on a page, spatially, while, at the same time, you work fluidly, creating a body of sound. It’s all about shape and shaping, making something. Everything matters, ear and eye. But I’m not as passionate about the music being dominant as when I was a younger poet. I’m far more aware that a poem is a performance of voice, that voice establishes the necessary connection to an unseen, unknown reader. I still think of that as creating a space where we can meet, rather than telling a story or imparting a message. How many political poems, for instance, are written for the already–converted? That’s easy. You want to quicken the reader’s imagination and take it somewhere unfamiliar, unexpected. This can’t be pre-planned. Yours has to go there, too.
Sheila
Yes. I am sure that is the poet Naomi Nihab Nye is talking about knowing that the poem has informed the poet so it can inform the reader when she writes:
Will someone please place this book on the steps of the White House? The poems of Stan Sanvel Rubin move with unobtrusive delicacy and deep grace through the mysteries of time and being. He’s a wise guide, rich with luminous beckonings, unflinching in the face of complexity. One feels more peaceful, reading these fine, compelling poems.
Stan
Very generous comments. I hope readers like the book for what it offers cumulatively as well as in individual poems.
I have always had a metaphoric, symbolic side, and a love of lush music. There’s no point in fighting your natural impulses. But, at the same time, you master them. You learn how to use them, you learn what they’re for.
This is a lifelong process I find exciting. Hidden Sequel is the flip side—it displays the minimalist impulse I have developed along the way. Statement and nuance of voice matter a lot because of the smaller scale. Many of the poems form a single sentence through many lines. Several of the poems are very short, some are short but sequenced to add up to something larger. I hope they’re like knife blades, that the few words penetrate. Someone who liked the book wrote that poem after poem left her with the sensation of having splashed her face with water from an icy creek. I liked that very much.
Sheila
Because you sense this power in the single sentence and the differences between that and your love of the lush music, how do you advise new poets about the way they work?
Stan
I try to get them to try the other direction, to write short lines if their natural impulse is long, to write imagery if their impulse is narrative, etc. Everything is development. If you go to a new place, you won’t lose the strengths you have, you may come back with new ones.
When you write a lot, you develop a way of writing. It may represent real achievement. But you don’t want to be stagnant. You don’t want to be pulled backwards. There’s no reason the poem you’re writing has to be like the ones you’ve already written. Changes—even small ones—are worth pushing to see where they lead. If you become aware of them, there’s a reason.
I care more now about training the inner ear for voice than for music, because voice is music, or should be. About how not to burden yourself with expectations, a poem is only a poem. But I always tell students to go with their impulses, uninhibitedly. In order to learn to shape, you have to put something there. Once it’s there, the fun starts, the game is on.
Sheila
You said you had an exercise you use that you’d share with readers. I’m ready!
Stan
I like to sit down regularly and just play, to surprise myself, to catch language in mid-stream, to connect to it where it is, already formulated.
One way I do this I call “writing backwards.” It won’t always lead to a good poem, but it’s amazingly good at getting something unexpected going. And it’s fun.
I start with a line that has caught my immediate, momentary interest—who knows why?—either in my head or, more often, out of the air, maybe something just said on the radio—and I write it on the page, exactly as I hear it. It’s important that I’m not “copying” something, say from a newspaper or another poem, but actually hearing the line, whether with internal or external ears.
Then there’s no need to “begin” with all the worry that brings: where to start? What’s “a good first line?” All that’s gone. I just start writing as if that “found” or “given” line has already started me, I’m already writing, the poem’s already in motion.
The trick part is this: I literally cut the line from its place at the top of the page and paste it way at the bottom, with white space to fill between. I fill it, until what I’m writing doesn’t feel fresh.
The other trick is: I never quite get to that line. I never even use it. I find it’s somehow already “in” the poem in interesting ways, it has set something in motion with its own meaning, something fresher, deeper, more unexpected.
As always, some revision, polish and cutting helps. But I’m freed from the burden of starting with Meaning and developing More Meaning. The meaning finds itself.
Sheila
I am going to try this. Before I go to sleep tonight, I am going to ask myself to wake up with a line in my head and then I am going to write something down when I wake up and work with it. I think your focus on playing with one line as a teaser to write down the page will help me get more work started!
But are you sure you don’t use that line?
Stan
Well, sometimes I do. I use the line, or part of it, as the title. It’s another problem solved.
Sheila
I like that. It seems that the line that encouraged the writing might encourage the reader, too.
I want to remember to ask you how, if you were to make a keynote address to a mixed group–lovers of poetry and those who say they just don’t get it, you would discuss poetry. What would you tell this group that might deepen everyone’s sense of what poetry does and why we write and read it?
Stan
I might say first, don’t be afraid of all the claims made for poetry by those who love it. “Poems should not mean, but be” is facile, because everything that is has meaning, some way, for someone, in some context. Often these are “big” meanings, life-or-death meanings that seem beyond any book. But it’s a great statement, too. It points to the fact that poetry is its own possibility, a way of rediscovering the world in the most personal way, of naming and keeping what matters, not what is supposed to. That’s for everyone. When the individual writer or reader enters language as an explorer, he or she is entering something larger than the self, no matter what the subject. To read or to write that way is to connect to everyone else who ever did that. That’s a large connection, one that defeats all narrowness, even death. It inverts the order of things. It’s a way of making the hard world wear a human face. It creates and nourishes the interior voice we need to survive. It’s eternally about freedom.
But the best thing would be just to read them some great poems.
Sheila
Would you “read” me one that has helped you “enter language as an explorer” to rediscover the world, one that you feel connected you to everyone else who ever did this? I hope the one you share is in the public domain or available online so I can include it in this interview!
Stan
I love this evocative poem from 1916 by D.H. Lawrence, which perfectly speaks through time. You can hear how the poet’s living voice runs past the simple rhymes and includes them. The poem’s music is inextricably part of what the poem says.
PIANO
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
Sheila
Thanks for that poem. As with all poetry, it makes me feel what needs to be said has been said and the rest is up to me to live.
Nonetheless, this is an interview and so questions are of the essence. I guess I’ll make it easy on myself this time: Is there a question you wish interviewers would ask you?
Stan
These have been terrific questions. Since I have the chance, though, I might add only this:
Question: Does writing and publishing poetry make your life in any way more beautiful, less painful, more important?
Answer: No.
Question: Can you live without it?
Sheila
I can’t. And I am glad you can’t either. As you write at the end of “Driving Home During the Eclipse”:
flat fields, two hands held
side by side to balance
what we keep trying to read life into,
love and its hidden sequel.
I am so glad we have the poems in your current three collections and will have many more to come.
****
To read more poems by Stan Sanvel Rubin and learn about his teaching visit:
The Nature of It — Salt River Review
The Past — Square Lake
Blue Light — Texas A & M University
The Century (and 2 others) — Custom Words
The Stain — Poetry Midwest
Three Poems — Ooze, Summons and Rope — Beloit Poetry Journal
Rainier Writing Workshop, an MFA low-residency program, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA