NA: On Monday, I posted an interview on this blog in which I talked about the anthology, Here, Poems for the Planet, edited by Elizabeth J. Coleman. I want to follow it with this interview with Sydney Lea, whose latest poetry collection is also called Here. I thought I’d start by posting the stunning opening poem from the book.
Here at Summer’s End
–for Jerry Dennis
That birds have largely quieted may distress us,
and like neglected mail, the garden’s lettuce
went yellow weeks back, then simply dissolved. But we ought to pause
before we focus on loss
in a season still teeming with vegetation.
No matter the month, our sense of wonder remains–
unless we will it to leave.
Even now the mercury flirts with 85,
so it’s wondrous, say, how starlings decide
to convene for migration. We can watch their flocks in the roadbeds.
It’s a marvel as well, whatever the force is
that already starts to blanch the legs of the snowshoe hares.
Our longing is always for now to endure,
though since the dawn of thinking, many a thinker
has found death an engine of beauty.
Truth is, however, our world will never go dead:
those heads of lettuce have fused with humus below,
and after those starlings wing off, the juncos and titmice will show,
and the ghostly hares of winter
won’t be ghosts at all but creatures
with dark flesh packed onto bone under ivory hides.
Coyotes will hunt them to keep alive
through the ineluctable –I almost said awful– chill,
and even then, the ice-beads on softwood boughs may look,
if we want, like permitted fruit. As a season nears,
or lingers, or ends, an amplitude can tell us
we still are subject to spells.
We’re here after all. Let’s chant it throughout the year,
like so much birdsong: we’re here we’re here we’re here
NA: When I first read this poem, I read it as an exhortation to remain optimistic in the face of inevitable loss, and to keep our sense of wonder alive. It’s an appeal that I find hard to follow these days, thanks to climate change. Were you thinking of that when you wrote the poem?
SL: Well, in all candor, though I am as full of anxiety about climate change and fury at its deniers as I can possibly be, I don’t think confronting its apocalyptic threats is what I was thinking about. For me, a poem tends to begin not with some « idea » but with a little inkling. I rarely have a sense of what it bodes until I have finished the poem…at which point that poem will reveal its about-ness to me– and even then only partly, perhaps.
As I recall, I was reading in Jerry Dennis’s terrific book, The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas, and I came on a passage suggesting that the sense of wonder will never leave us unless we allow it to do so. I happened to look up and notice a pre-migratory aggregation of starlings (invasive species!) gathered in our field. Then I started to write.
Given Jerry’s words, there can be small doubt that an impulse to optimism, or maybe rather a yearning for it, despite all the reasons for pessimism anybody can muster, preceded what I wrote.
Truth is, pessimism is too damned easy. It’s a safe escape. Anybody can do it, as I know too well, because I am inclined in a gloomy direction a great deal of the time. (Our GP calls me Eeyore and my can-do wife Tigger.) But the fact remains that unrelieved dreariness is a lazy person’s recourse, and it contributes nothing in the end.
NA: Peter Taylor, the southern fiction writer and a friend of my parents, once told me that in order to become a writer, I should rely on what he called my gift of gab, or what my father jokingly called my gift of circumlocution. In some ways, your work reminds me of Peter Taylor’s. I think, at the core, you are a New England storyteller, just as Peter Taylor was a Southern short story writer and a natural raconteur. I wonder what you think of that comparison, and of his advice.
SL: To be compared to Peter Taylor is an honor of which –no false modesty here– I am not worthy. But Robert Penn Warren, an early and precious encourager of my poetry and a friend of Taylor’s too, said something very similar about garrulity. He recalled sitting in the company of older countrymen and –women in Kentucky and being moved by the way they told stories. My upper New England connections go far back, and they provided similar experiences in kitchen, lumber camp, canoe, hunting cabin, and so on, and at a very early age I was enthralled by those voices, but also by the way in which the stories became a kind of community property.
So even if pure narrative is for me not as important an aim as it was when I was a younger writer, what I call narrative values– the speaking voice, character, setting– remain crucial to what I do. I do not, by the way, propose what I do as a self-evident virtue; it is merely what I do, and scarcely precludes my love for all manner of other approaches, including your own, my dear interviewer.
NA: In both your work and Peter Taylor’s, place is almost a character, a voice, a presence. And of course, the title of this book is Here. I wondered if you would say a few words about the importance of place in your work.
SL: Well, place is obviously a crucial matter to me. (My one novel is entitled, tellingly, A Place in Mind.) And in a curious way, that matter relates pretty directly to the whole narrative impulse to which you just referred. I would have to be a hell of a lot more « postmodern » (whatever that means) than I am to imagine a story devoid of physical associations. In my case a drifting away from sensory reality –here I am: what does it feel-look-taste-smell-sound like?– is a drifting into…what? Foolishness. Sometimes I like to make cases in my poems, to argue, to use rhetoric in its classical sense; but if I do that without « grounding » my commentary in something tangible, I just become an inane talking head.
NA: Many of your poems reflect on loss, or immanent loss, and speak of loved ones who have died. But I don’t think you mention the poets you have admired and known. What one poet (besides Frost) is or was a major influence in your work? Just talk about one.
SL: I’ve spoken of Mr. Warren. I should also mention Maxine Kumin, who blessed me by suggesting that I avail myself
of common sense, which she had in uncommon and dazzling measure. Anthony Hecht strongly approved of my early efforts, also a blessing. To be absolutely honest, however, I’d say that Romantic English poets were my most compelling models, especially Wordsworth, with his conviction, as he says in the uncompleted Recluse, to find exalting poetic themes in “the simple produce of the common day.”
Frost, another obvious mentor, as you note, was if anything anti-Romantic, but in one of my favorite of his lyrics, “Hyla Brook,” he asserts that “we love the things we love for what they are.” To refer to the poem with which you started, when I write that
it’s wondrous, say, how starlings decide
to convene for migration. We can watch their flocks
in the roadbeds
I am almost perversely aware that starlings are in most respects very unexalted birds; they are not eagles– but what’s wrong with “what they are”? The common day often can and must suffice.
You told me to limit my comments to one poet, and I seem to have defied you. 
NA: I love this poem:
Chimera
The eagle’s wings were angled
In a stoop that seemed almost languid,
And yet in an eye-blink it flew
Past the window and out of view.
For me, now in my seventies,
It can feel as if everybody
Were gone, or about to be gone:
For instance, my brother-in-law,
dead some time now, young.
I loved him for years and years.
Parents. A sibling. Peers.
The great creature’s cutting across
The window: less sight than loss,
As if flight had exemplified
The concept, brevity,
And the bird were conscious of me,
And consciousness were crucial
In you or me or an eagle.
SL: Oh, I hadn’t known you’d be quoting me on an eagle. It’s kind of a good segue, though, in the sense that that poem is, I think, a corrective to sentimental views of nature, which Tennyson was right to describe as “red in tooth and claw.” Let’s marvel at the natural world, all right, but let’s not Disney-fy it; above all, let’s not imagine it as a great storehouse of metaphor, whose function is to provide poets with compelling figures of speech. One can be hopeful without lying.
NA: I am still wondering about your influences, particularly your spiritual influences. The title of the book, Here, sounds very Zen to me. And so many of your poems show a profound reverence for nature. Nature, a source of metaphors for many poets, is far more than that in your work.
SL: I am skeptical of poetry –particularly my own!– as prophecy. And yet there are some odd prognostications in this book. Looking back, I note how many of the poems, including the title poem with which you started, express a sort of wonder at the fact that I am still living in a physical world. This may just be a product of being in my seventies. Many, probably most of these poems were composed before late August of 2016– when, at 73, I had a heart attack, and came close to not being in that world.
Had my own male forebears not all collapsed from cardiac events, including my father at 55, I’d never have thought to visit the tiny clinic an hour from our Maine camp on the New Brunswick border. I’d been training for an annual flat-water kayak race, thinking I’d do the twelve-miler rather than the six that year, because I felt about as fit as I had even the summer before. I noticed a pinch, something like a mosquito bite, in my chest. I didn’t pay it much mind. I had no dizziness or shortness of breath, though I did feel unusually tired. I figured things would sort out if I took a nap. They didn’t, so off we went. After a three-hour ambulance ride from that small hospital, I arrived at the cardiac unit of the Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor.
I don’t smoke or drink, and I exercise pretty vigorously. When I said that to the cardiologist, he said « Hmmm…Think genes might have something to do with it? » My right coronary artery was 100% occluded. A stent was put in and, three years later, this summer, I established a personal best in the race.
The poems that followed my coronary seem more consciously aware of how physical presence, here-ness, matters. In the collection’s final poem, for example, I write about sitting in my my long-time barber’s chair:
I contemplated the ancient jug of Lucky Tiger,
Paul’s horseshoe-pitching trophies,
The snapshot, curling around its tacks,
Of the 350-pound bear at his feeder.
And Paul. And myself. Right there in the mirror,
As ever.
All those simple details felt like marvels. I have always known (and this may be the Buddhistic inclination you surmise) that I am at my best when I am as fully engaged in the present as I can be, at my worst when I am projecting problems and outcomes into the future. I am not a Buddhist but rather a radically unorthodox Christian; and I can get similar lessons from my church’s tradition: « Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself »; « Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? » And so on. Of course, I betray my own sanity every day, but I do know where it lives.
NA: There is such love of family, home, neighbors, and nature in your work, such happiness, such gratitude—even when you write of grief, sorrow, sickness, or your own mortality. I think of you as one of the rare happy poets I know. Or rather, one of the rare poets who writes well about happiness. That’s one of the things I admire about your work—I who come from a father who always said, “If you have something nice to say, don’t bore me.” Is this a conscious decision? To be uplifting?
SL: I have had several interludes of clinical depression, a couple demanding hospitalization, in my life. So, for all the countless blessings I have been granted, I do know what the dark side looks like, and I think my poetry collections may wander into it in their opening sectors. But I do purposely arrange those books (and sometimes individual poems within them) to suggest that there can be a path or paths out of despair. One sure way to block the escape, I believe, is the egotistical delusion that I can make immense changes in the universe by way of exerting my puny self. There is a Power, indeed many, far greater than trvivial me.
The final section of Here suggests that a lot of un-hip, bourgeois pleasures– matrimony, fatherhood, grandfatherhood, friendship– lie along the way up and out of the mire. As I may just have implied,I placed “Here Itself” in the final position by design. It rehearses some simple behaviors like getting a haircut or paddling the Connecticut River, which turn out to be subtly redemptive.
I know, I know: such redeeming moments would scarcely be available, say, to a Honduran mother robbed of her children as she endures life in one of the vile Trump's accursed camps. I have, I suppose, written my share of poems lamenting or attacking human-imposed suffering. Yet I remain utterly unconvinced that poetry is the best means of helping to alleviate such horrors. Rather than writing raves or boo-hoo poems about the conditions poets may observe (in too many cases out the window on their way to the faculty meeting), why not do something more practical? As for me, for two decades I’ve been deeply involved in a land trust whose mission is to conserve forest (400,000 acres of it, a pretty good carbon bank), but not merely to set it aside: we strive equally hard to provide sustainable provide timber-products jobs in the poorest county in Maine. For a quarter century I also taught in and chaired an adult literacy organization in Vermont, a wonderful outfit that, of course hardly because of my efforts alone, offered its own path out of despair for a great number of people.
None of my endeavors, none by the worthy institutions to which I lent what help I could– none fixed Syria. Nor Libya, Sudan, Guatemala...on and on. But the plain fact is that I am where I am, and where, I trust, poetry is available, to quote Wallace Stevens, "merely in living as and where we live."
NA: I know what you mean about the limitations of poetry. That’s why I’ve written The Last Book of Orgasms, which I imagine to be my last book of poems. Who has time for orgasms or poems these days? I am only half-joking. But again, I am reminded of something Peter Taylor said—that we write what we are given. I’ve always been interested in the word, given.
SL: Well, no more talk of quitting writing from you, maestra! That awful notion dispatched, I agree that the notion of the given–whether or not « religiously» construed– is an absorbing one.
It is, for one thing, despite all I’ve said about living in the palpable world, often hard to say where « reality » leaves off and our subjective take on it intrudes. One might even make the case that since the Romantics, that issue is the one that poetry is meant to explore. And of course the dichotomy may be, probably is, a false one altogether. To revert to the influence on me of those old New England yarn-spinners, I have known men and women whose character and existence made it hard to distinguish capital-N Nature from human nature.
NA: I’d like to close the interview the poem, “Easy Wonder.”
Easy Wonder
Oxbrook Lake, July 2014
My love, we floated for hours
in kayaks, side by side, scarcely dipping our paddles.
No motors allowed here, no soul in any
of the southerly shore’s three other cabins.
Still, we orbited north,
through a calm, sequestered cove, where beavers had left
musked piles of mud on four flat rocks.
We didn’t smell fetor: the breeze bore it off.
The beavers somehow know
to place their mounds at every point of the compass.
We wondered how they could be so precise,
though ours, to be sure, was easy wonder.
The same breeze lifts the curtain
in our room, from which we’ve banished watches and clocks,
having no obligations, our children grown,
they and their children not due here for weeks.
The wind raises tendrils of hair
from your pillowed head. How I adore your hair.
The water, quiet marvel, appeared to lift us
above all tension, above despair
at those wrenching deaths last year,
your mother’s and brother’s, and whatever else could appall.
You trailed an arm in the water. I love
your arms, and your legs, which were tucked in the hull.
As if fixed in one place, the sun
shed just the right warmth on us as it floated there.
We floated too, between water and air,
as if we’d never be let down.
Sydney Lea, a former Pulitzer finalist, founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review. His twentieth book, and his thirteenth collection of poems, Here, is now available from Four Way Books, NYC, in 2019. In summer of ‘18, Green Writers Press re-issued his collaborative book of essays with former Delaware laureate Fleda Brown, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives.In spring 2020, Vermont’s Green Writers Press will publish The Music of What Happens: Lyric and Everyday Life,his collected newspaper columns from his years (2011-15) as Vermont Poet Laureate. Lea and former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate will publish their hybrid epic Wormboy with Able Muse in 2020.
