How Poetry Informs Us, with Ellen Bass

WE ALL KNOW THAT writing informs us. But it’s possible that each genre within writing informs us differently. How poetry informs us is the topic of my discussion today with writer, Ellen Bass. Listen in and/or read along as she and I take on this marvelous topic. This conversation has been slightly edited for this format.

Marion: Today, my guest is writer, Ellen Bass. Known predominantly as a poet, Ellen’s work appears in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, as well as The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and The Sun, and has appeared in hundreds of other journals and anthologies. She’s a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She’s been awarded fellowships from places like the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, and has received the Elliston Book Award for poetry from the University of Cincinnati, and many other awards, including three Pushcart Prizes. She is the person with whom I want to discuss how poetry informs us. Her newest collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in April, 2020. It’s a wonder to behold. Welcome, Ellen.

Ellen: Oh, I’m delighted to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Marion: It’s a joy to meet you. In the opener, I referred to you as a writer, but we talk a lot about identity these days. Most of us, some of us at least, are learning the language of who we are and who others are and to be respectful and accurate. And for some reason, I expect a poet to be really good at this. So, how do you identify yourself?

Ellen: Being here as a writer, I think of myself as a writer. That’s one of my primary identifiers, and I write poetry. I’ve also written nonfiction, and I’m a teacher. In addition to that, I’m a woman, I’m a lesbian, I’m married. I’ve lived with my wife for 38 years. I also identify as bisexual, even though I’m in a 38-year monogamous relationship. I think that’s an important thing that is very different from when I was younger, and these categories were very rigid. And now, we see all the fluidity in sexual orientation and gender. I’m a mother of two grown children. I am white, I’m Jewish, I’m old-ish. I’m going to be 73 this month.

Marion: Old-ish. I like that.

Ellen: All of those things.

Marion: I mean, I ask because writers bear such a burden of marketing ourselves these days, and when discussing our work. I mean, I’m a memoirist, I’m a nonfiction writer, I’m a feminist, and on we go. But when you get up and speak, when you get up, when you have to represent yourself, when you have to sell yourself, to say you’re a gay, white, multi-platform, contemporary poet is a mouthful, but accurate. And I guess my question is, how much of a lens do you think we need to supply as a poet for someone else to be invited into our work?

Ellen: None.

Marion: Do we have a responsibility to… None. That’s the answer I’m looking for.

Ellen: None. None. And also, being of this age and having been writing, and in the writing world for over half a century, I have the fortunate position that I don’t really have to sell myself anymore. I don’t mean I don’t have to be out there. Poetry does not go places by itself. I think of it like a child where you have to hold his hand and walk it across the street. If you write a novel, that novel might go out into the world by itself, but poetry needs you to give it that hand, and take it out. So, I do have to do that in order to let people know that my poems are there and available for them to read, and give them a chance to be introduced to them so that maybe then, they will find value in them.

I don’t mean to say that… I mean, certainly, right now, Oh, my God, June 2020, we know how essentially crucial it is for us to be looking at race, and as white people, white privilege, and to be amplifying black voices and voices of people of color. So, I don’t mean to, in any way, devalue that importance. But when I read a poem, most of the time, I don’t need to know anything except what is in that poem. If the poet’s race or gender or sexual orientation or ability or disability, or whatever it may be, is important to that poem, it will be in the poem, in a way that communicates to me. And if it’s not important, then in that particular poem, it doesn’t matter.

As I’m talking to you, I’m just looking ahead on my wall, and there’s a tiny poem by Langston Hughes, who we know was black and was very publicly, actively important, writing about race and writing about being black. But this little tiny poem is called Island. And I’ll just say it to you because it’s a poem that sustained me during many hard times.

Ellen:

Ellen: During hard times, I’ve sometimes said that poem to myself over and over through the day. And I often think, there’s Langston Hughes. When he wrote that poem, he never imagined that miles and years after he died, that there’d be a white lesbian in Santa Cruz, California, holding onto his poem to get her through the day, and get her through the night. So, poems can transcend… Whatever Langston Hughes’ sorrow was at that moment, I don’t need to know what it was, because everything I need is in the poem.

Marion: So, let’s invite others. You said that we’ve got to sort of take the poetry out and walk it around to get it out into the world. I would love to ask you to do so with one of your poems, if you would read, please, your title poem from your new book, Indigo. I would be really honored. (It was published in The New Yorker here).

Ellen: Oh, I would love to. Thank you.

Ellen: Indigo.

As I’m walking on West Cliff Drive, a man runs
toward me pushing one of those jogging strollers
with shock absorbers so the baby can keep sleeping,
which this baby is. I can just get a glimpse
of its almost translucent eyelids. The father is young,
a jungle of indigo and carnelian tattooed
from knuckle to jaw, leafy vines and blossoms,
saints and symbols. Thick wooden plugs pierce
his lobes and his sunglasses testify
to the radiance haloed around him. I’m so jealous.
As I often am. It’s a kind of obsession.
I want him to have been my child’s father.
I want to have married a man who wanted
to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much
that he marked it up like a book, underlining,
highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.
Not like my dead ex-husband, who was always
fighting against the flesh, who sat for hours
on his zafu chanting om and then went out
and broke his hand punching the car.
I imagine when this galloping man gets home
he’s going to want to have sex with his wife,
who slept in late, and then he’ll eat
barbecued ribs and let the baby teethe on a bone
while he drinks a cold dark beer. I can’t stop
wishing my daughter had had a father like that.
I can’t stop wishing I’d had that life. Oh, I know
it’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.
It took eight years for my parents to conceive me.
First there was the war and then just waiting.
And my mother’s bones so narrow, she had to be slit
and I airlifted. That anyone is born,
each precarious success from sperm and egg
to zygote, embryo, infant, is a wonder.
And here I am, alive.
Almost seventy years and nothing has killed me.
Not the car I totalled running a stop sign
or the spirochete that screwed into my blood.
Not the tree that fell in the forest exactly
where I was standing—my best friend shoving me
backward so I fell on my ass as it crashed.
I’m alive.
And I gave birth to a child.
So she didn’t get a father who’d sling her
onto his shoulder. And so much else she didn’t get.
I’ve cried most of my life over that.
And now there’s everything that we can’t talk about.
We love—but cannot take
too much of each other.
Yet she is the one who, when I asked her to kill me
if I no longer had my mind—
we were on our way into Ross,
shopping for dresses. That’s something
she likes and they all look adorable on her—
she’s the only one
who didn’t hesitate or refuse
or waver or flinch.
As we strode across the parking lot
she said, “O.K., but when’s the cutoff?
That’s what I need to know.”

Marion: Beautiful. And you particularly laid bare that the topic of your parents in this book, how your mother lives within you, how your daughter and you have this unsteady, but bonded relationship, the hands-on caregiving you gave to your father, how you love and live with your wife. So, what are we doing when we graphically and honestly and precisely write like this? Surely, we’re not just merely showing our lives to others. What’s the process that you-

Ellen: No, as I tell my students, no one cares about your life. No one cares about you.

No one cares about me. I mean, we are talking together, so now you care about me a little bit, and I care about you a little. But when you’re reading the poems, no one thinks, “Gosh, I wonder what happened to Ellen after that? I wonder how it’s going to turn out?” It’s not like that. The poem, if it’s a successful poem, says something to the reader about his or her or their own life, or about human lives in general. So, I use the material of my life because that’s the material I have to work with. Those of us who write from our own lives, which for the most part, I do. Not every single poem, but for the most part. And so, that’s the material I’m given.

I think of it, and I tell my students, that it’s as though I lived in some very remote place and once a year or a couple of times a year, somebody would come by with different household items that were needed, like bolts of cloth. And they only had a certain number of bolts of cloth. Maybe they had 10 bolts of cloth in their little wagon. And so, that’s the cloth that I would have to work with to make the things that I needed to sew that year. And those are like the elements of my life. Those are the things I have to work with. But they’re not, I’m not sharing them so that you know about me, I’m sharing them because that’s what I have to make these poems about what it is to be a human on this planet at this time.

Marion: Yeah. So, let’s talk a little bit about process, write from scratch, in the moment. You see something, the pork chops in your marvelous poem, Ode to a Pork Chop, which is my new favorite poem. And you do what? Are you carrying a notebook, an index card? Are you talking into your phone? What is your mode of notation in the moment, as you see, feel, hear, smell, taste something that you want to note?

Ellen: Well, I do try and carry, if not a notebook, at least a piece of paper and some kind of writing implement. And of course, now that we carry our phones around, that’s very handy because I can jot down a few lines or a few words or notes to myself. Because I have found that if I don’t jot those down, I am going to lose them. And sometimes, even the most simple five or six words, if I don’t write it down, three or four hours or a day from then, I don’t remember the order, and I liked it the way I thought it up. So, that is important, and I do take little notes. But sometimes, I don’t write things down and I just kind of wait.

This particular poem, Ode to the Pork Chop, was… We are grappling, as many people are, with the way animals are raised, those of us who are not vegetarian or vegan. So, some friends of ours raised this pig that we were able to get some meat from. And so, when I was cooking this pork chop, and I found this… I’ve also written about chickens that we slaughtered. And I found that my relationship to meat, that I knew where it came from and that I had a part in its death, is very different than my relationship to meat that I buy in the store. So, the care with which I cook it, with which I make sure I use every little part of it, is really different. And it is a kind of devotion to that life that I’m getting this meat from. So, I was really primed with this pork chop to pay attention. And…

Marion: I guess you were. It shows. It’s interesting. I just took delivery on a whole pig. I have a bunch of freezers. I have a very old-fashioned mentality about food. So, I also use every scrap. I know how to use every scrap.

Ellen: Oh, that’s great.

Marion: But maybe that’s why I adore that poem so much in your recent book, Indigo. But you have two odes actually in the book that I loved the Ode to a Pork Chop and Ode to Fat. And let’s talk about the choices that go into writing topics. A pork chop, and a deep appreciation of another person’s body fat, maybe those are unexpected in a poetry collection. If you’re a classicist… I mean, who’s to say? But how do you decide what goes in and what goes where? Because they weren’t next to each other, those two odes. You didn’t go, “Here are my odes.”

Ellen: Right, right.

Marion: You spread them out.

Ellen: Exactly.

Marion: And I loved them both, but they both were appreciative of the topic. So, how do you make the decision about what goes in?

Ellen: I love writing odes to things that are not usually praised. And I think, yes, Annie Dillard said, I’m going to not get the exact words here, but she said that everyone loves the same things best. So, the writer’s job is to find the thing that only you love. And I think with the pork chop and fat, that I came close to that. Of course, the great ode writer, Neruda, also wrote to very homely things, like his marvelous ode to his socks. So, we do have a… And Sharon Olds; new book, newish book, Odes, has marvelous, marvelous odes to all kinds of things that have never been praised before in a poem.

Marion: I’m so glad to see both of those there. It gave me hope for all of us, that there was an ode to a pork chop and ode to fat. And it gives me, poetry always has given me hope. I began my own education as a writer with poetry, reading it, writing it. And I credit it with giving me the ability to research all day long, whatever I need to know. Because if I’m in a… And if I’m in a particularly, I don’t know how to characterize this particular mood, but I might reply when asked what I do for a living that I spend the whole day looking for another word for blue. But-

Ellen: Yes.

Marion: I don’t think of it as an… Yeah, it’s not an indulgence, it’s a work ethic. And I can be kind of pissy about it with in-laws and stuff, when they kind of wish I had a real job. But what do you think living hard by each word this way does for us as, and I mean, literally does for us, as people, as humans, as thinkers? Each word… I mean, I think I’m remembering it correctly that Emily Dickinson used to cut words out of magazines and put them next to each other, just to see how they looked.

Ellen: Oh, I love that. I love that. That’s beautiful.

Marion: So, what does that do for us, as humans, to live so hard by each individual word, do you think?

Ellen: Well, I think it allows us to say the unsayable. A poem can’t be paraphrased. It is what it is. I mean, you can say to somebody, “Oh, you should read this poem about the pork chop,” but I can’t paraphrase the poem because the words are exactly as close as we can get them, to saying something that you really can’t just say right out. If you could say it another way, then you would. This is the only way to say it, and to say the thing you’re saying.

Marion: I really love that. If I could say it another way, I would. It’s just really a nice response to so many things.

Ellen: I think… Really. Really, yeah. I’ve been reading this wonderful, wonderful book by Verlyn Klinkenborg called Several Short Sentences About Writing.

Marion: Oh, I love him.

Ellen: Do you love him too? Well, he’s new to me.

Marion: Oh.

Ellen: So, I’m just so excited about him. And he talks about how children understand that the exact word is the only way, and that if you change the word order, or if you’re reading a book to a five-year-old, he talks about, he says, I’ll read it to you. “The meaning of the sentence is never a substitute for the sentence itself, not to a six-year-old. This is still an excellent way to read. And you know if you’re reading to a six-year-old, and you flub a word and they know that book well, they’ll correct you. They’ll say, ‘No, no, it goes like this.'”

Marion: Absolutely.

Ellen: And so, everything, the exact word, the meaning of the word, the sound of the word. The great poet, Frank Gaspar calls it the mouthfeel of the word, the connotations of the word. Every word brings with it a huge trail of the way that that word’s been used through the years, sometimes through the centuries, what its different shades of meaning are. And so, that’s what we’re doing is, we’re trying to say something which is too complex to say in a soundbite or a cliche, which would only be reducing it. We’re trying to say something without reducing it, and to allow it its full complexity. And to do that, yes, we have to look for the exact word to get it that blue.

Marion: I’ve always wondered if we looked at a poet in a functional MRI, one that can actually watch brain process, that if we would see a difference in the workday, than say, if we watched the brain of a fiction writer or reporter pounding out a piece. Because this process of annotation is similar, that trust we have to have of what’s in there. Everything we’ve ever eaten, thought, felt, considered, every movie we’ve ever seen, it’s all in there. And then, it’ll come up for us. I’m so grateful for that process. But I think with poetry, the precision, the one word that going into that sort of Walmart-sized subconscious of ours, and getting that different word for blue has a brain process that I would just love to see in a scientific way. Do you have an idea?

Ellen: Actually, I’ve read about that a bit.

Marion: Have you?

Ellen: Yeah, they’ve done… Yeah, around metaphor, which is kind of the thing that I’m maybe the most, the aspect of the craft that I feel closest to. And they’ve done brain imaging of people reading metaphors. When you read a metaphor, a part of your brain lights up that does not light up when you read a description of that thing without metaphor. So, your brain, when you read a metaphor, is doing the simulation very quickly. If you say, my love is like a red, red rose, your brain is, in a microsecond, without you being conscious of it, holding up love and your love, the beloved and the rose, and going quickly back and forth, back and forth, between them to do this authenticate.

Marion: Oh, yeah, great.

Ellen: Your brain is trying to authenticate it. And when you read a metaphor that doesn’t work, your brain rejects it, and says, “No, it’s not like that.” But if it really works, it’s authenticating it, and you actually have an experience. Whereas, if you just read something that talks about it without using metaphorical language, then the brain, that part of the brain doesn’t light up. We get the information.

Marion: Well, I’m just very glad to know that.

Ellen: It’s amazing, yeah.

Marion: I love that. I will look at that-

Ellen: Yeah.

Marion: And the functional MRI and the metaphor, because that feels right. Cellularly, I completely get that because-

Ellen: Yeah.

Marion: We experience, in those kind of overlays, those intellectual overlays, when somebody metaphorms something for us, is just a singular joy. There’s no other feeling like it when we get it.

Ellen: Yes.

Marion: And I enjoy that so much. There’s so many aspects of writing I love. I love reporting. I love research. I, too, love metaphor. I think it does feel intellectually gorgeous. And I feel a lot of freedom and remarkable excess when I’m writing my first draft. I call my first drafts my vomit draft. It’s very much like dumping a 10-million-piece jigsaw puzzle on the floor.

And then, what I love best though, is rewrite, because it’s the tidying up. It’s the… And I think, and I do… I don’t write poetry anymore, but I did train myself on it for years, but I might have this mistaken opinion that rewrite for a poet is smaller and different. And so, set me straight. You get a first draft or something-

Ellen: Yeah, I’d love to talk about that a tiny bit. But I also remembered, I just want to come back just to tell you that the part of the brain is the part that senses texture through touch. And so, it’s very physical. It’s the parietal operculum.

Marion: It is.

Ellen: Which I love to say. Isn’t that a wonderful-

Marion: I can tell that. I could tell that you did.

Ellen: Parietal operculum.

Marion: I’ll expect to see that in a poem any moment. It’s-

Ellen: I hope so. Wouldn’t that be-

Marion: Angularly beautiful.

Ellen: Oh, that would be so much fun. I’m going to try.

Marion: Sure.

Ellen: So, revision, for me, different poems go through a different process. Sometimes, I do have that jigsaw puzzle dumped out, and everything is there, and I just have to find it, wade through the waters, and find it. Sometimes, the revision process is digging deeper into the content of what I’m trying to grapple with, because I haven’t yet made the crucial discovery as to what it is that I can find out, that… I mean, in a poem, you’re always wanting to find out something that you didn’t know before you wrote it. If you just write down what you already knew, then you’re still on the diving board. You haven’t jumped off yet. So, that’s a high bar. It’s a high dive, high bar. And sometimes, I’ll write something and I’ll go, “Well, okay. So what?”

Mark Doty has a wonderful poem called Little Rabbit, Dead In The Grass, and in the middle of it, he says, “And now we come to the so of the poem,” and there’s a question mark after so. So, it’s like, so what? Sometimes in the revision, it is not an editing process or a smoothing process, or trying to make sure that the rhythm in a line is just right. Sometimes, it’s much, much messier and deeper and richer than that, looking for what is it that I haven’t yet understood. And then, some of the revision goes on and on and on for me. In this recent book that I published that just came out, Indigo, there’s a couple of poems where, right at the 11th hour, I lopped off three-quarters of the poem, and realized that it just wasn’t necessary. So, that process does go on and on and on with some poems.

And some poems, there’s one poem in here, ironically, it’s titled Failure, but it took me 12 years to write it, and… Not continuously, thank goodness. But every few years, I would take it out. I continued to be interested in the event that sparked the poem. And I’d give it another really good try and work on it for a few months, and then just put it aside, because I still didn’t get it. Then finally, finally, finally, 12 years after the original first draft, I found a way into that poem. And I found both a way into it and a way out of it, the beginning and the end, that were more satisfying.

Marion: Oh, that’s so generous of you. That’s so lovely of you to tell us. I have so many stories that I haven’t figured out the so of it yet. I haven’t figured out what the piece is about. I have the illustration, but I don’t know what I’m arguing. Oh, that’s a beautiful word, illustration. Yeah.

Ellen: I love that.

Marion: I believe that pieces are about something and that you can be the illustration of it when you write memoir. Because I’m predominantly a memoir writer and a memoir teacher, and getting people off of thinking it’s about them is the biggest assignment. But I have lots of scenes that I just haven’t used yet because I don’t know what they’re about. I just know what happened. And that’s a big difference.

Ellen: Right, right.

Marion: So, you have a website.

Ellen: I do.

Marion: I have to tell you, I don’t think I’ve ever been so surprised by anything when researching a writer, because I… A poet with a website is just a phrase that does not usually happen, a poet of a certain age with a website. I mean, I’ve got friends who are well-published poets, who don’t have cell phones, and let alone a website. So, as we start to wrap this up, let’s just talk a little bit about being online. Why are you there? I mean, thank you for being there. I am a huge believer in it, of the need to be available. But you have a real website. We can watch you read. We have access to all your books. Talk to me about how that happened, please.

Ellen: Well, I am not an academic. I do now teach in a low-residency MFA program in Oregon, Pacific University. And I love teaching there. I’ve been teaching there for the last dozen years. But for most of my writing life, I’ve been teaching independently. And when I started… Now, we’re going back to like 1970. That meant… This was before, way before computers. So, that meant writing by hand a flyer and taking it around town, and tacking it up, so that I could teach out of my living room. And so, the need to connect with my community, and with other communities, has always been there for me. So, that feels very natural to me. I did feel some reluctance every step of the way, moving into more and more and more technology. But the great thing is that there are people who help you with that. And so, I have a beloved assistant who I couldn’t do what I do without, and our mutual friend and writer, Roxanne McDonald helps me online. So, I don’t actually do these things myself, but I participate in having them happen.

Marion: Glad to see it. Well, yours is Ellen Bass dot com, and I recommend everybody go there and listen to you read, and to see the many, many books you’ve written. It’s just a joy to talk to you. I hate to let you go, but I’ve got to let you go. But thank you, Ellen. This is just a terrific conversation.

Ellen: I know we have to end, but I feel the same way. We could talk for the next hour or two, happily, couldn’t we?

Marion: We absolutely could. And I’d love to have you come back and talk about your nonfiction writing. So, let’s make a date to do that, if you-

Ellen: Sounds good. Sounds good.

Marion: Great. Thank you. And the writer is Ellen Bass. Her book, Indigo, is just out from Copper Canyon Press. Get her books wherever books are sold. Watch her on YouTube. You can listen to her work on her website, Ellen Bass dot com. I’m Marion and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at OveritStudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit Marion Roach dot com and take a class with me. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to it wherever you go.