At this past summer’s Writing It Real in Port Townsend writer’s conference, Susan Rich spoke to the conference group about building a writer’s community and finding a place in the world based on one’s passion for poetry. This week, I’ve interviewed her about the development of her books of poems and the ways in which she founds and joins communities based on the power of poetry.

Sheila:
Susan, thanks for returning to the pages of Writing It Real. In January of this year, you wrote a wonderful instructional article for us, providing useful ideas for help writing poetry. In April of 2005, I reviewed your first volume of poems, The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World, published in April 2000, and last week I reviewed your new second book, Cures Include Travel, both from White Pine Press . The poems in your books provide excellent models for those wanting to write poetry (I included an exercise based on your poetry in each review). I am excited to talk more about your poetry.

I am also excited to talk about your involvement in both writing communities and world communities. Poet Ilya Kaminsky uses these words to describe you: “Susan Rich–for whom living in this world and writing about it is one and the same flash of poetry’s transforming revelation.”

Let’s start with the easy questions. Over what span of years did you write the new poems? Are some of them older poems that were not included in your earlier book?

Susan:
I wrote most of the poems in Cures Include Travel after my first book was out, but there are some exceptions. “In Search of Alternate Endings” was a poem I left out of the first book because of its line lengths. The exceptionally long lined tercets did not work with the margins needed for a standard trade paperback. I couldn’t bear to have those lines broken and so I left the poem out. However, after reading it at a Seattle event last spring, the audience response was so positive, that I went home that night and re-wrote the lines– now long lined couplets. The poem now works within the margins of the book. Another poem, “White Lilacs” about my mother’s death, was written ten years ago while I was still in graduate school at the University of Oregon; however, it’s been through another dozen revisions since then.

Sheila:
It seems that publishing requirements can help us in our creative efforts. I also know from biographical material about you that strengthening communities, including your local and national poetry community networks is a passion. Can you tell us about some of the projects you take on that strengthen the poetry community?

 Susan:
I come upon so many great literary projects and fill much of my time contributing and organizing for them. The two most recent involve my work as an editor for Seattle’s Floating Bridge Press and my work as a Community Advisor for Hedgebrook — a Whidbey Island, WA retreat for women writers. Floating Bridge Press works to promote and publish poets throughout Washington State. Each year, we publish one chapbook award winner and one anthology of poems selected from the manuscripts that we read for the chapbook. Pontoon (our anthology) is published every fall and highlights the work of between 50 to 65 Washington State poets. In addition to this, or really along side the publications, we set-up readings for the poets throughout the state. We are an all-volunteer editorial board, although we do pay the poets that we publish to print their work. Now in our twelfth year, Floating Bridge Press is beginning an endowment campaign so that we can promise our community, “Poetry Forever.”

My commitment to Hedgebrook began as soon as I arrived on Whidbey Island for a residency there, more than a decade ago. “Women Authoring Change” is Hedgebrook’s mission and they do it with incredible intention and intelligence. At the moment, I’m working with Hedgebrook’s new Executive Director, Amy Wheeler, and some amazing Hedgebrook alumna, to set up a network of the 1,000 women that have been residents at Hedgebrook so that we can work together supporting each other and Hedgebrook in numerous and creative ways. The first reading of Cures Include Travel was co-sponsored by Hedgebrook and a portion of all the proceeds that Elliott Bay Book Company made from my book that night was donated to Hedgebrook.

Sheila:
I know you feel supported by a community network of writers and publishers and patrons, which is why you contribute your time and effort to helping enrich the community. How does this community support you?

Susan:
The poetry community in Seattle, and throughout Washington State continues to amaze me. I think the support and the open-heartedness that poets in this state extend to one another is something special. I say this having started my writing life in Cambridge, Massachusetts where there were lots of readings and poets — and also lots of backbiting and mean spiritedness. I’ve recently come to believe that if I had stayed in Boston, I never may have believed in myself as a writer. The pecking order was too explicit and my few published poems didn’t allow me a place on to the map. A friend there once told me, you need three poetry books and at least one Harvard degree before you can call yourself a poet in Cambridge.

In contrast to the rarified Grand Dame of Cambridge Poetry model, Seattle area poets go out of their way to share resources when it comes to contest announcements, publishing venues, and job postings. The philosophy here seems to be that we’re all in this together and when one of us wins a prize (three National Endowment for the Arts prizes in poetry were awarded to Seattle-Tacoma area poets in the last cycle) it benefits all of us. I know of no other state that has more poetry festivals, writing conferences, residencies and other literary events than Washington. No place where the beginning writer is welcome into the same writing circles, and with equal respect, as the more experienced writer.

The motivating energy here is that we are a community and care for each other’s small Miracles. I felt this the night of my book launch at Elliot Bay Book Company. Over sixty people came out to support me. I got to see my students, fellow poets, fellow editors at Floating Bridge, alumna from Hedgebrook, and colleagues all together in one space and time. As a result of the number of people that came out, and then translating that into the number of books sold that night, Cures Include Travel ended up at number seven on the bestseller list of Elliott Bay for the month of September. Since there is no poetry bestseller list, I was on the non-fiction list – which was quite a thrill. This only happened because of the community that supports me. But beyond a crowded reading and book sales; I felt held that night by energy far beyond my own.

Sheila:
I know that you are very interested in the poet being a part of the world—your book titles indicate that clearly and the poems support it mightily. What are the projects you take on that unite poetry and the world?

Susan:
Well, I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus this summer as I’ve been preoccupied with the launch of Cures Include Travel, but there are two projects I’m doing that are ongoing. The first is Somali Voices in Poetry, which is under the auspices of the Somali Rights Network. I’ve interviewed about a dozen ethnic Somalis about their lives in Somalia before the civil war, their escape during the war, and their assimilation into life here. The
Seattle-Tacoma area has the third largest Somali community in the United States and yet so little is known about this amazing culture and the atrocities these people have endured.

My project is to listen to each person’s story, to honor their experience as best I can (as feeble as that may be given my inexperience with fleeing civil war) and to write poems about each person. Recently one dear Somali friend read one of my poems and told me “it sounds like it was written by a Somali.” That’s the best compliment she could have given me.

Sheila:
Might we “listen” to a poem you wrote from this project?

Susan: “The Exile Reconsiders” is for my friend Ubax, who was the first person that stepped forward to let me conduct an interview. No one really enjoys being reminded of the hardships they endured and the horrors they witnessed during wartime. Ubax’s courage in the face of all that silence was key to the beginning of the project. She knew that if she came forward, others would be far more likely to follow:

The Exile Reconsiders

Tonight, the tides pull through your shoulders
take up residence in between
your breasts, the teeth of the pocket comb.

Stars shoot themselves

along the edges of each year
And the night’s purple darkness

finds you; refuses to go.

How to parse a palimpsest life?
The seasons

of paperwork raveling
like the magician’s fist
disappearing one country for the next.

A legend of broken maps
In your bones

pale blue aerogramme by the phone.

Your grandmother’s cattle,
rhythmic dots in the field,
leave a trail of milk on the tongue,

Tomorrow, the hoopoe inside you

will rise up
call above the seaboard–
cool mistress of turn and return;

mist-lit, two-fold, you’ll leave
or linger here,
undiminished.

Sheila:
Thank you, Susan. Your poem draws me inside the heart and mind of one who has experienced extreme and continued geographical and cultural transitions. Of course, I had to look up the word palimpsest: a manuscript page, scroll, or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again. The palimpsest metaphor provides a visceral experience of a life erased and another written over it, perhaps only to be erased as well. Knowing the meaning of the word and being made to experience change as abrupt and harsh, makes the image “cool mistress of turn and return” all the more devastating.

And even as you are documenting the stories of Somali exiles in Seattle, you are also planning more work concerning the needs of second international community. Where are you in that project?

Susan:
The other part of the world that I’m interested in at the moment is Bosnia where I worked in 1996 and 1997 as an Electoral Supervisor during the first national and then the first regional elections in that country. More recently I have become the faculty advisor for Friends of Bosnia based at Highline Community College where I teach. For International Women’s Day last year some of the women interviewed other Bosnian women about their experiences during the war. I’ve started working with the transcripts of those interviews as well (with the permission of the interviewees).

This May I will return to Sarajevo, Bosnia after ten years away. I hope that in addition to the poetry readings and writing workshops I will give at the university, some other projects bringing poetry and human rights issues together might take flight.

Sheila:
What do you have in mind when you imagine that outcome?

Susan:
Thinking of a set outcome is the death of the imagination for me. I look forward to meeting again with the young woman who was my translator, Lejla Mulalic, when I worked in Bosnia almost twelve years ago. I also hope to visit Srebrenica — the site of the massacre where in the course of five days in July 1995, over 7,000 men and boys were systematically killed by Serbian soldiers and buried in mass graves.

This week, I received a letter from Lejla in which she wrote, “Each time I read one of your Bosnian poems, I feel that you are giving me my emotions back, objectified but beautiful, and it’s such a unique experience for someone who feels the war you write about as ‘her own’.”

As a poet, giving emotions back is what I hope to do to humanize the world. If I can write more poems worthy of such praise, I will be thrilled.

Sheila:
I am sure that your poetry heart is with you in all the work you do. Some of that work is in putting your poems together. What do you learn about your work in the process of doing that?

Susan:
This time around I learned some incredible lessons. Cures Include Travel had several earlier titles including Not a Prayer, and after that, The Exile Reconsiders (these titles are now poems in the collection). As I went about reordering poems and renaming sections, I learned something that amazed me.

Each configuration created an entirely different book. Yes, these were the same poems in each of the three mixes, but due to the changes of title and section headers, a new lens was created that the reader would look through and which would ultimately color how the poems were understood.

One example is that when the book title read as Not a Prayer, there was a spiritual (or perhaps anti-spiritual) frame to each poem. Everything was read as a heightened spiritual journey. And while I liked this idea very much, it somehow didn’t ring true for every poem in the collection. I ultimately felt that this overt tug towards the spiritual was counter productive to the collection as a whole. This title also seemed to key into each individual reader’s idea of prayer and ultimately, that didn’t seem like a good idea. One friend confided to me that if she walked into a bookstore and saw a book with this title on the shelf, she would never, never, pick it up. Her childhood experience of religion had sadly turned her away from prayer forever. Someone else told me that many religious bookstores would order my book simply because it contained the word “prayer.” This was enough to convince me that Not a Prayer had to go. I wanted a title that was a bit less at the mercy of others interpretations of what my book was about.

But what was my book about? That seemed the central question I needed to answer. And yet, as soon as I posed the question to myself, my mind rebelled. If I could sum up my poems in a few simple sentences, why spend six plus years writing them? A well-known editor once passed on a collection of my work because she wanted more cohesion in the collection. My sneaking suspicion is that publishers are looking to sell poetry as the new novel in the way that in the 1980’s and early 90’s short story collections became known in marketing circles as linked fiction.

If I wanted to write a novel, I would. But why must other literary genres bend towards the formal elements of fiction?

In the end, I found the process of naming and ordering a book of poems somewhat terrifying, especially once I realized that each title would result in a completely different manuscript. Did I want to emphasize the death of a parent or the epic journey of a refugee girl fleeing civil war? How would what title I chose complement or clash with the title of my first book (The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World), presumably on the shelves side-by-side with it?

For the longest time I didn’t want to let go of having a person (refugee, traveler, magician) in the title. I wanted it clear that my poems were very much peopled. There are so many competing voices and ideas for how to put a book together. Today in publishing there is a real push for manuscripts that possess a “narrative arc” — some kind of clear storyline that brings the poems into a unified whole.

Some good examples of books of poems that work well as collections are Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris, Kate Lyn Hibbard’s Sleeping Upside Down and Adrienne Rich’s Atlas of a Difficult World–each of these very different collections rely on a sort of inter-poem conversation to create further meaning. In Hibbard’s collection, reading the poems in their set order allows for a story of a love affair to unfold. Reading the poems out of order is not as satisfying as reading them front to back. I suspect that publishers think this sort of ordering makes a book of poems more approachable to readers of fiction and memoir, and they might be right. And yet, it seems unfair that this is now the model that poets are supposed to follow. In Denise Levertov’s letters to William Carlos Williams she tells him that she merely gives a pile of poems to her editor and lets him pick and choose what he wants to publish because isn’t it the poet’s job just to write the poems? Not any more.

My title came to me in a rather magical way, although, technically speaking, it isn’t really my title as much as a phrase that I’ve borrowed (with permission) from another poet, Jack Coulighan. Jack is a poet and a physician that has just edited More Primary Care by the University of Iowa Press. It turns out that he knows Peter Pereira, another Seattle poet and my dear friend. It was yet another poetry friend, Allen Braden, who introduced me to Coulighan’s work at his presentation at the 2004 Skagit River Poetry Festival. I then tracked down Jack Coulighan through the magic of the World Wide Web and introduced myself. It turns out his poem was inspired by an old physicians’ reference on ways to remedy heartbreak; consequently, the phrase “cures include travel” took on a literal connotation as well as the spiritual connotation I intended.

While a resident at the Helen Whiteley Center, I found a painting by Mark Leithauser, who was also once an artist-in-residence there. His piece is called “An Early Exchange,” and it moved me in a way few paintings ever had. I knew in a moment that this was the perfect cover for my book. To me, my book seems like it is a collaboration with a poet I’ve never met and a visual artist I don’t know.

So to answer the question I posed to myself, my book is about Cures Include Travel. Whether from heartbreak or earthquakes, we need cures to remedy the fissures in our lives.

Sheila:
Susan, thank you for inspiring us with your commitment to people, to communities and to the strength poetry brings. Those of us who read and write poetry long for our lives to be governed by the intimacy and authenticity that poetry cultivates. Knowing your work makes a life in poetry feel possible.