LIDIA VIANU

Poets

RUTH FAINLIGHT

Honesty, clarity, simplicity

Interview with RUTH FAINLIGHT (born 2 May 1931), British poet
Published in LIDIA VIANU, Desperado Essay-Interviews, Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2006

© Lidia Vianu

LIDIA VIANU: Rereading your poetry, I find I cannot help choosing more and more poems for my anthology of Desperado poetry. I try to keep the selection within limits, but each new poem is as quotable as the previous one. What I mean to say is that your poetry grows on the reader. We had one first interview, before we actually met, and before I had read your latest Selected Poems and the latest three volumes. What is taking place now is more the beginning of a book on your creation than a real interview. An informal talk about a poetry that does not hide the poet, yet invites to a million questions. Actually, the questions are negligible here. Your reaction will be all that matters.

I will start with your name, predestined for your kind of texts: Ruth (as in the opposite of ‘ruthless’, and what splendid sympathy and warmth it is, too!), Fain (as in ‘gladly’, if I am not mistaken) and so very much Light. Your poetry, even at its saddest or most tragic, is so full of light. If you may have chosen your last name – which does not seem to be the case, your first name is definitely yours since birth. Has it ever occurred to you that life endowed you with the most beautiful pen-name? Have you ever thought of changing it?

RUTH FAINLIGHT: I’ll answer the last part of this question first – no, it has never occurred to me to change my name. Because it is unusual, as a child sometimes I was teased about it – but this amused rather than upset me. Since I began to publish my poetry, at times people have come to me after a reading and remarked that Fainlight is a very poetical name; but until now the word itself has not been analysed, ‘deconstructed’ with the care you have given to it. What can I say – except thank you very much!


LV. An early poem (Gloria) muses:

My muse is in myself:
As past and future
Only exist
By my own need to think them...

Your muse, I should say, is the inner diary you keep of each little, everyday incident, which can easily become a poem, which can turn into art before you have had time to consider the change. You write poetry as you breathe. You turn air into poems. This is not a question, it is my strong feeling after reading all your volumes. Is it all right for you to use autobiography as a source for poems? So many poets reject it violently that it scares me to think how many impersonal lines are being written. Asking my MA students in class what they expected of poetry today, the answer came promptly and unanimously: ‘We want a being beyond the sheet of paper.’ You are that being. My question is, what do you think of all those poets who invent masks, intertexts, cultured refuges from their own inner diary? Can the intellect replace the living soul?


RF. My most recent poem – and I’m not even sure that it is really finished – deals with this question: whether it is possible to write poetry without revealing oneself. I do not think it is possible. The poem is called A Bowl of Apples, and makes a comparison between the poet and the painter: my ‘argument’ is that, although a painter can look at a bowl of apples and see it only as a composition of volume, colour and line, to the exclusion of any other meaning, can ignore ‘the implications/ of fading tones and softening forms’, for the poet, ‘Words force definition:/ the medium’s limitation. …. // I cannot/ bring the apples into being/ and not reveal my own nature.’ (Of course, it would be possible to argue that painters also cannot avoid revealing their own natures in their work, but … this is a poem, not a philosophical thesis!) I am absolutely convinced that, even if a poet chooses for subject what seems most distant from the personal, the preferred point of view and angle of approach, the choice of metaphor etc etc, are all determined by the personal history of that poet. In any case, no writer ever tells ‘the truth’ plain and simple; (least of all when writing autobiographically!) I would always sacrifice the accuracy of a factual detail for the sake of a rhyme or an assonance.
 

LV. Vertical is a poem you feel represents you, and I feel the same. ‘Jew. Woman. Poet.’ is a line your admirers know well. You have already made it clear that you are a feminist – an old-fashioned one, thank God – but being Jewish is not a statement your poetry cares to stress. How does Ruth Fainlight the Jewish woman feel about her Jewishness? I have the feeling this makes you more international, if anything. It does not have anything to do with religious belief, but a lot with the fate of the Wandering Jew, who is in many places at once and belongs to none (see Country Cottage). Would that be what you feel?

RF. This is an accurate perception of my feelings about being Jewish. I am Jewish – there is no way I could, or want to, deny it. The reaction of other people is part of one’s ‘Jewish consciousness’. And I am glad to have this rich heritage, about which I am learning more and more. But – as well as being an ‘old-fashioned’ feminist, I also remain an old-fashioned idealist, with anachronistic ideas such as internationalism, equality etc, and am deeply saddened when these ideas are scorned in the world of today. To me, the term ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, a critical epithet often applied to Jews, is a badge of honour! That is the sense in which I am Jewish. So yes, very ‘international’.


LV. The same poem (Vertical) has a very Desperado statement, I think: ‘But/ I am released by language,/ I escape through speech:/ Which has no dimensions (...)/... sets me free/ From whomsoever’s definition...’ I certainly cannot pin you down to a group or a set of features, which is baffling and delightful. You are always somebody else, in a very refreshingly new poem. You escape any attempt at definition. I admit it is my ambition to define what is going on in poetry today, but it will probably be a kind of non-definition, because all Desperadoes – poets and novelists – deny belonging with somebody else, to a recognizable group. Similar in dissimilarity is the major Desperado feature, as I see it. You have already told me your reservations about the cowboy word I have chosen for my theory. The die is cast, hopefully the word will grow on readers, it is not for me to say. What I want to ask is: What do you make of this instinctive and Desperado-like desire all recent writers have to be their own trend, to be like nobody else, to be alone and unlike everyone? To take literature in their own hands and fight heir way beyond all known frontiers? Originality is essential to art, but what happens today is a hysteria of novelty. Do you feel it? How? What is it leading to?

RF. I think that since the time of the first artists we know about – by which I probably mean the ancient Greek playwrights and poets – some artists have wanted to align themselves into ‘schools’ or groups, and others, for ‘temperamental’ reasons, have rejected the idea indignantly and insisted that they are completely sui generis, with no connection to what anyone else is doing. Taking the long view, one can see that there is always a connection – the work of contemporaries always relates to and influences others working at the same time. But there is absolutely no need for the artist to realise or acknowledge this. So, in answer to your question – in fact I don’t think that the situation is different now than it has ever been.


LV. The Lace-Wing has these three lines:

The intensity of our mutual
Examination exhausted me.
We almost exchanged identities.

I realize, reading them, that what I am looking for in a poem is not so much the personal story of the poet (his private life is his alone, after all) but precisely this emotional intensity you always have, with the grace of lace and the piercing effect of a needle stuck into flesh: you can describe your own love without revealing incidents too private to become art. You can find meaningfulness where others rush thoughtlessly – you fear to tread, yet go such a long way. Should I be more lenient with poets whom I dislike exactly because of the lack of private intensity? Can poetry do without it, replace it by imaginary translations, invented stories, sophisticated combinations of words and fancy rhymes which make understanding quite difficult?

RF. I do not know how it would be possible to write without being driven by emotional intensity. For me, that intensity is another name for inspiration. When I do not sense this intensity in the work of another poet – (depending on my mood and state of mind), either I think I am being particularly obtuse or I think that they are no good! So few of those who write poetry and publish poetry and even are regarded as important and significant poets, will be remembered twenty years (much less fifty or a hundred) after their deaths. A sobering and necessary thought.


LV. Dinner-Table Conversation is dedicated to Robert Lowell. I wonder why. It has a few remarkable lines:

I must build my own San Francisco: the place
Where hazard reigns and poetry begins.
Would I be less a woman or more a poet
Denying my own triumphs and defeats?

You have a particular humility, I do not think you could ever humiliate anyone, but are very vulnerable to others’ attempts at putting you down. Your sense of decency prevents you from attacking anyone, but this does not mean your pride ever gives up. You are as indomitable as you are frail. Actually, you only look frail. Inside I suspect you are adamant. Am I wrong? Your poetry is not at all soft. You wield the words. Why does Lowell come in precisely in such a poem that asserts your strength?

RF. This is one of the poems based on a real incident. The occasion was indeed a dinner party where I was seated next to Robert Lowell, and his dismissive attitude to women poets or even the very idea of women writing poetry (which surprised me, because I knew his high opinion of Elizabeth Bishop), infuriated me. As far as I remember, I sustained my side of the conversation. Perhaps afterwards he even thought I was ‘interesting’ — but I knew that he was far too set in his opinions for my words to have any effect. The memory rankled; and it became necessary to my peace of mind to confirm my value as a poet to myself. Such experiences need a lot of brooding over before one gains enough objectivity and distance to make them suitable material for a poem. I don’t remember how much time elapsed between the incident and writing the poem. Quite a long time, I imagine.


LV. August Full Moon describes your study ‘Where the desk is placed in a corner between two windows...’ Such details bring you very close to the text, in the text, actually. I find it natural that the reader cannot help starving for the private, the intimate, the revelation of another self in poetry. Can the poet deny his poem the privilege of being, even looking like a diary? Eliot once said, ‘How unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot...’ But we did meet him in his so-called (by himself) impersonal lines. This you have in common with him. We meet you, too. Where you differ is on the issue of clarity. You make a point of writing so that everyone can understand. After Joyce, I think, the novel would have died if it had not found its way back to a clear story. After Eliot, I think, you felt you needed clarity in your lines in order to secure an audience. I have not seen one poem by you which does not have a clear meaning. I should also say that I have not seen one single poem without a meaning (which happens so often with others). Do you feel meaning and clarity should go together? How come you never write encoded poems (like Yeats once) and is it a willful choice?

RF. Sometimes I do not understand the meaning of one of my own poems until years later. I want my poems to be clear – BUT – poetry is not primarily merely another method for conveying a message; the music of the words, their sound and rhythm – the language – is what makes it a poem. Otherwise it is verse at best, propaganda at worst. (I’m not quite sure I know what you mean by ‘encoded’ poems, as applied to Yeats. Are you referring to his mystical ideas? Yeats was one of the most important twentieth century poets for me when I was young, and I still admire him immensely.)


LV. The mask is definitely a major poetic device. Yet I can’t help feeling I must break the mask and taste an intimacy with the poet. I had thought it was only a peculiarity of my sensibility till a class of fifty students confessed they felt the same (after four years of reading poetry). Eliot bragged about impersonality and he could hardly have been more private and personal. I admit I hate impersonal poems. Desperado poetry can be very bitchy in that sense. It insists on sharing but refuses to say what. Shared emotion is beautiful, only it must be someone’s, and the reader refuses to go all the way alone. A poem needs to belong, and by this small sentence I say it all. You yourself write:

Honesty, clarity, simplicity.

No hiding behind equivocations – (Glass-Thoughts)

You do not assume a mask. You are not afraid of yourself in the mirror of words. Would you mind if, beyond the emotion, the reader tried to rebuild the very story of your life? This is maybe going too far, maybe you resent the reader’s desire to turn your poetry into a novel? But your volumes, as they follow one another, do reveal a plot. One of ageing, but also of ripening tenderness and of a uniquely sharp sensibility. Do you mind this? Did you aim at this hybridization, this mixture of poetry and fiction? I find it the highest achievement of a poet, which Eliot aspired to but could not reach, actually.

RF. Very interesting – the thought that reading through my collections of poems reveals a sort of autobiographical plot. I have not worked towards that end consciously – but I can understand why a reader could think this – and I accept it. I also love prose-poetry, and am always happy when I write a prose poem.


LV. And now a trifling matter (apparently): you talk so much about the moon. You say in Moon: ‘Old reliable Moon, who /Always makes me write poetry./ My sister Moon.’ Do you usually write at sunset or late into the night? Is your sign of the zodiac connected in any way to the influence of the moon? You obviously talk more about night and the moon than about bright daylight and the sun. Any reason for that?

RF. The Moon. My zodiacal sign is Taurus but (according to Ted Hughes, who was extremely interested in astrology) with the influence of Scorpio very powerful. But I am not fluent in this ‘dialect’, nor sure what those comments signify – and I have never tried to find out. I have been less interested in astrology than in other ‘alternative’ structures to comprehend ‘the meaning of life’. From an early age I read everything I could find about mythologies from different parts of the world, and about religions, beliefs and cults (although I never joined one). I read a lot of psychology and anthropology. I have always been eager to understand more conventionally scientific explanations, and am an avid reader of scientific books (to the limits of my capability). Cosmology interests me more than astrology. But – to get back to the moon! Also from an early age, I have felt a strong affinity to, and connection with, the moon. The phases of the moon have always affected me, both as a woman (the menstrual cycle) and as a poet (poets are lunatics!). The muse of poetry is the moon, as far as I am concerned.


LV. I cannot help noticing a few Eliotian echoes, like ‘Cancer (...) scuttling’ , which reminds me of the ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ scuttling across the floors of silent seas...’ It may be far fetched. On the other hand, I know Robert Graves too little and it seems it was he who really influenced your beginnings. You do have a poem entitled My Position in the History of the Twentieth Century, but it does not make things clearer fro me. Whom do you belong with? I asked this before: Could you name several literary friends, older and younger?

RF. My Position in the History of the Twentieth Century records my consciousness of being a rich, privileged white person – but also alludes to that recent period when I would have been an inferior, endangered ‘untermensch’ - i.e., a Jew in Europe during the Nazi period – and contrasts those two conditions, determined entirely by place and time. I don’t think it has anything to do with literary influences.

I have been ‘influenced’ – and then cast off the influence – by all the great poets of English literature, from Thomas Wyatt through Milton, the Metaphysical poets, the Romantics; by Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, D.H. Lawrence and of course Eliot, Yeats, Graves, Auden – etc, etc, ad infinitum. (Then there is poetry in translation….) You ask who I ‘belong with’? What more could one hope for than to ‘belong’ with them all!


LV. The sibyl is a favourite mask, maybe the only one, with you. The sibyl is the poet, the seer, sensibility, tragedy, art, the whole wide and doomed world. The sibyl is all your fears put together and well hidden. Were you trying to do that? Why a sibyl?

RF. I began the first Sibyl sequence (in Sibyls and Others, 1980) at the suggestion of the distinguished American sculptor and print-maker, Leonard Baskin, who wanted to collaborate with a poet on a book about sibyls, because he had begun a series of prints and drawings of sibyls. Then his (and my) good friend Ted Hughes mentioned to him that I would be a good choice, being well-informed on such matters. I accepted gladly. It was my first experience of working in this way; sometimes I wrote a poem in response to one of Leonard’s images, sometimes he made an image in response to a poem. (Since then, I have worked with artists on several more books. The ‘Sheba and Solomon’ sequence in my new book was a similar ‘commission’ from an artist, the Brazilian sculptor and print-maker, Ana Maria Pacheco. She is still working on the images for the livre d’artiste. I have also collaborated on three books with Judith Rothchild, an American print-maker who lives in France. These books are always extraordinary luxury productions, terribly expensive, produced in very small editions, 25 to 50 copies, and are bought by rich collectors of the artist’s work, not by poetry lovers!)

I am always grateful to the artists who ask me to work with them – it is another form of inspiration. In the same way, working with young composers – I have written three libretti, two for the Royal Opera House and one for a television production – has opened new possibilities for me.

It is only possible to work in this way with someone whose work you respect, and on a subject close to your heart.

The Sibyl was a perfect vehicle to express some of my deepest feelings – as you have understood very well.


LV. You find yourself, while Deadheading the Roses, ‘in a losing fight against autumn’. This is the best description of your most touching, painfully piercing poems. Eliot called Yeats ‘preeminently the poet of middle age’, as I said, but you find even more to say than Yeats’s ‘a tattered coat upon a stick’. Middle age is for you a fact of life, even life itself, rather than a mere metaphor. You see it with a remarkable sense of humour. That is why I think that, versus Modernist Yeats, you are a Desperado: irony, clarity, simplicity, the admission that a poet needs his audience and must regain it. Even feminism can come in. Whatever the name, you do belong to after-Modernism. Do you see any common features for poets today (or is it my job to find those and your right to reject any labelling?)?

RF. It is accurate to say that I have been a poet of middle age. Now, perhaps, I am becoming a poet of old age! (You will be interested to know that, choosing her ‘Personal Best’ among books published this year, the novelist Margaret Drabble included Burning Wire, saying: ‘In the Dream is the poem you need if you think you may be growing older.’)
 

LV. Only two of your poems have a fancy arrangement of words on the page: Divination by Hair VI and Art. In the first case, the manner is almost stream of consciousness. In the second it is more Desperado, it dreams of fiction while staying a poem. There is definitely rhythm and there is also a very discreet rhyme in your poems, but the music of your poetry comes more from inside than from the noise of words. I should call it a preverbal music. It is the music of your being. I think a real Desperado does not think half as much as Yeats or Eliot about uttered musicality: he is concerned with the music of this world and of other, revolving worlds of his soul, which is a universe. The Desperado poem has discovered only now the theory of relativity: rhyme is relative, it all depends on your ears. But meaning is essential and it has to reach the reader. Some of my interviewees so far have told me that rhyme was essential to them, and, frankly speaking, at times I had to take great pains to find it in their poems. I was too interested in their meaning to notice the art of the word. How important is this art to you? Would you think of your poetry as music above all, or meaning and whatever mastery of language the moment allows?

RF. See, on the ‘writersartists’ website:

Statement of poetic belief – theory and practice:

‘I try to keep the words of a poem close to the feelings and sensations that inspired it, in the hope that it will inspire the same feelings, recognitions, and memories in its reader. In this way, she or he become involved in its reality, even a participant in its creation – because reading is an active relationship between reader and writer.

But writing is a relationship between writer and language. A poem develops organically from the first inspiring phrase. That phrase, or cluster of words, includes every essential element of the poem, and the poet’s work is to allow all its potential of sound and meaning to realise itself. And like every other living organism, its development is a unique combination of unassailable laws and the entirely unexpected.’


LV. In The King Must Die I noticed two lines: ‘I know that I am dying with the country/ I still love and call myself.’ I should not take them out of their context, but sometimes this is what an interview is all about: you find emblematic lines and try to build a profile. When you talk about your parents, your son, your tenderness for the man in your life, you take intensity with a grain of salt. You mock at yourself out of the corner of your serious eye. This is revigorating and makes the reader stronger, it makes him feel in control. Is that how you feel when you write?

RF. Irony – the grain of salt – is an essential element of my nature and thus of my poetry also; so I am delighted, not surprised, that you are aware of it.


LV. Like Shadows on the Lawn begins with ‘sentences form in my head/ float in and out of my mind.’ It gives me the feeling that you live in a volcano of words and the hottest burst out, like magma. Some Desperado poets impose a certain coldness on their lines, that air of impersonality I disapprove of (nothing new in that). The real poets give in to the cataclysm. You actually eat your cake and have it: you write in cold blood about ‘the horror of daybreak’ (Yeats again). You are more Yeatsian than Eliotian in your reactions (not in the verbal encoding of your poems, though). Your major discovery and step forward is that poetry can be, must be clear. Has it ever happened to you to think in confuse words and then go back to the page and clarify the text, make it accessible on purpose? Or, maybe, the reverse?

RF. For me, revision is always an attempt, firstly, to get back to the initial impulse and feeling which ‘inspired’ the poem. (In the complete text of the piece ‘Statement of poetic belief’, I deal with this in more detail.); and secondly, to express the subject and its associations as clearly as possible. I never consciously try to confuse or to obscure – neither in syntax nor imagery.


LV. More than falling in love (you fall in love with life over and over again in all your poems), I find images of marriage in your poems. To Break This Silence mentions ‘him with whom I share my house and life’, with whom you spend ‘Hours each day together’. You also murmur, ‘The habit/ of our mutual isolation...’ The conclusion is: ‘we/ have come to be the other’s fate and climate.’ Your life is shared with the novelist Alan Sillitoe, who must somehow fill in the gaps: where you are tough he is sweet, where you are mild and gentle he is vertical and uncompromising. He looked that way to me when I visited you both for a brief moment in London. I was for the first time in the capital of English, the language I had learned under communism as a dead language, and the majesty of the City of London overwhelmed me. I did not feel like doing much or talking to anybody at all, but when I phoned you and heard in your voice a kind of burning impatience which no merit of mine could have spurred, I felt ashamed and hurried to your house. You met me and my daughter, with Alan close behind. After a formal visit to Peter Ackroyd – wonderful person, but with whom I had not managed to find anything in common the previous day – you offered me all the Oriental warmth I had not even dared dream of. I felt I had known you for ages, for lives. Was it the race that we shared? One of your poems says you befriend strangers easily, maybe recklessly. You certainly did befriend me. I took with me that day a piece of your soul and Alan’s gentleness. How did you meet him and what has kept you together?

RF. A few years ago I wrote a 10,000 word autobiographical piece for Contemporary Authors, W.H. Wilson Co. World Authors 1985-1990. They must have a web-site, so any information will be available there. But, with regard to this sort of question: in my opinion, biographical material is not needed to understand and appreciate poetry. I certainly did not know – nor was curious about – the personal lives of the poets who were important to me when I was young. Biography seems to be an obsession of the present moment!


LV. Thinking back, I see you as more, much more than just ‘vertical’. You are relentless, you pursue poetry with stubborn force. As you yourself say, you are an ‘unrepentant nature’ (Here), you are your ‘own tamer’. But deep down, there is ‘the pain/ that shapes and haunts me’ (Stubborn). What pain? Why pain? Your poems carry a burden of the soul rather than the elation of sensibility. Your own sensibility is thoughtful, not enthusiastic. Strange to say that, because you yourself are a person who can suddenly become extremely enthusiastic. Again, is this meditative pain the heritage of your race?

RF. ‘Is this meditative pain the heritage of your race?’ you ask. Maybe. Perhaps. Probably. The whole project of writing poetry is an attempt to understand oneself. If I could define myself so easily, so definitively, I would not (would not need to) write poetry.


LV. The poem Author! Author! confesses:

What I am working at and want to perfect —
my project – is the story of myself: to have it
clear in my head, events consecutive,
to understand what happened and why it happened.

I wander through department stores and parks,
beyond the local streets, seem to be doing nothing;
then an overheard phrase or the way light slants
from the clouds, unravels the hardest puzzle.

It takes all my time, uses so much energy.
How can I live, here and now, when the past
is being unwound from its great spindle, and tangles
forgotten motives around the present? Rather

than set the record straight, further knowledge
complicates. I cannot stop the action
to make a judgement, or hope for better.
Every gesture casts a longer shadow

into the future, each word shifts the balance.
I see myself as one more character
in this extravagant scenario,
the story not yet finished. And who’s the author ?

My question exactly. How do you see yourself? You are so considerate, yet often ruthless, when it comes to human stupidity. My students felt they were in very close touch with you when they read my selection of your poems. And yet they knew next to nothing of the ‘scenario’. Is your life what you expected or wanted it to be? Why is every day like a blessing (because this is the feeling I get while reading you)?


RF. The poem you quote, Author! Author! is one answer to the previous question. I should very much like to believe that every day is a blessing and that life itself is the great privilege – but rarely achieve this blessed state of mind! It is very difficult to forget the cruelty and injustice of the world and to accept that it always has and always will exist; to try to explain it to oneself. This could be regarded as a religious attitude; perhaps it is. But, although I know that I have a religious nature (whatever that means) – as I believe every poet has – I do not adhere to the practice of any religion.


LV. In Memoriam H.P.F. states:

I shall not meet my dead again
as I remember them
alive, except in dreams or poems.

There are your parents and your brother, and also your aunt, on the one side, and many more whom I am not aware of. Who are they? In what way were they dear to you?

RF. Yes, In Memoriam H.P.F. is dedicated to my brother, Harry Paul Fainlight.


LV. One of my PhD candidates has entitled her dissertation The Sirens’ Knot, after your poem The Knot, which ends with: ‘Words would form a knot and start a story.’ All your poems tell a story. It is one of my major ideas that the hybridization of literary genres – the mixture of poetry and fiction – which was so fervently desired by the modernists is only happening now, for the Desperadoes. In consequence, novels become sequences of longer poems or just haiku (see Graham Swift, Peter Ackroyd or Kazuo Ishiguro), while poems desperately plunge into stories, as if to dodge the romantic overflow of lyricism, to break the fury of what tradition thinks poetry should be (strong feelings, ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’, if Wordsworth is to be taken for granted). The Desperado poet is not at peace when he writes and he also denies having strong feelings: he pretends he feels nothing. You do not clamour feeling, either, but you allow it to glimmer and actually it gets very strong while the poem builds up. How do you get along with your contemporaries, with those poets who write coldly, trying to protect their privacy against the reader’s starving desire to share? How do you work out this combination between imaginary story and private hell?

RF. Are you asking about narrative poetry? Quite a lot is being written in England and the USA recently. (I am in our cottage in the country at the moment, so cannot refer to my books, but I can think immediately of Les Murray the Australian poet, Mark Jarman and Rita Dove in the States, Jackie Kay and Craig Raine and Bernadine Evaristo in England – among many others who have successfully written ‘novels’ in verse. And of course there are earlier poets like Robert Frost, (‘The Death of the Hired Man’). Wordsworth wrote his autobiography as poetry! Tennyson. Robert Browning. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (‘Aurora Leigh’), Byron’s ‘Don Juan’, etc.

LV. Femininity and age go hand in hand for you. A poem (August) muses: ‘August is like a woman who’s already thinking/ that she’ll soon be forty.’ Sadness and pain become you, because you do not complain, you just think and express them through. Femininity, for you, also implies uncertainty, I think. In Japanese Syllabics I find the following:

my constant need for reassurance,
my placatory smile – the nodding
head-piece of a jointed wooden doll,
agreeing, agreeing.

Talking about Japan, of course (when did you visit it? why and what was your reaction besides what this poem says?), you wonder, ‘am I imposing/ an alien system of values/ and totally misunderstanding?’ You betray your fear you might hurt someone unwillingly, your considerate gentleness here. This is so much like a woman. When you say you are a feminist, I think you are just being a woman through and through, a woman of your times, who wants to be man’s equal (not to replace him, as recent feminists dream). What does it feel like to be a woman/ wife/ mother? A woman poet? Would you rather write in a genderless way?

RF. I was in Japan for a few weeks in the mid-1980s. Alan was invited by International PEN to speak at their annual conference, and they kindly included me in the invitation. Then his Japanese publisher extended our stay. I was absolutely fascinated by the country. I have always admired many aspects of the Japanese aesthetic, and was fairly well prepared to appreciate many things. You might notice that the group of poems about Japan is written in formal structures: syllabics, sestina, sonnet etc. – which seemed appropriate for such a formal society. (And I adore Japanese food!)

You ask if I would like to write in a genderless way. I am a woman – so everything I write is written by a woman. There’s no way to escape it, I can’t evade it! That would be as impossible as trying to deny being Jewish. I mean precisely what I say, when I write: ‘Jew. Woman. Poet.’. And yet – I know that not only as a poet but also as a spiritual being I exist ‘beyond/ below/ above gender’. In my recent poem, In the Dream, I write:

In the dream I was an old, smiling woman
— like one of those Japanese wise men
(squat-bodied, knotty-limbed, head tilting back
as if to make eye-contact with something
only he can see above him in the sky)
you might find in a woodblock print.

In the dream I was as free as they.
Decades of tension and vanity had slid like
a silken cloak off my shoulders. Now,
the coarse weave of my dress was faded and worn,
garb of a pilgrim or hermit (though others
moved beside me on the road, through the market),
and I knew this was a crucial moment: when
I woke I could choose – for the rest of my life
if I wished – to be that woman.
 

LV. Until You Read It is such a considerate poem. You certainly have regained the audience Modernists may have lost. The reader can only feel exhilarated when seeing it:

Like music on the page
which has to be played
and heard, even if
only by one person,
this word, this phrase,
this poem, does not exist
until you read it.

You were born in New York. American poetry today is so aggressive and unfeminine. So haughty. Some poets think the whole world should revolve around their enigmatic creation. You do not. What does it feel like, to be born an American, half-Jewish, living in England, talking to intellectuals all over the globe, answering questions asked by a Romanian?

RF. Lidia, I am not half-Jewish. Both my parents were Jewish. Their parents were Jewish. I am entirely Jewish, whatever that means. (Rootless cosmopolitan!)

LV. In Privacy on Lake Ohrid you admit:

I can’t resist,
early evenings,
staring into
lighted windows –

When I visited you, in mid-September, it was a sunny morning and I felt like staring and staring at those buildings and lives that were not only totally unlike mine, but also the ideal of my childhood and youth, when I was never allowed to talk to an English native speaker, when London was the name of another universe. I passed by a park near your house (we had arrived too early and whiled away the time walking in rounds), but it was locked and it made me feel that childhood interdiction all over again. Then we passed by a small restaurant full of quite affluent people, and we felt again we could never belong there. The architecture of the houses all around was so strange and unknown to us. Then the door of your house in Ladbroke Terrace opened, we climbed the stairs and there you were, making everything familiar for us all of a sudden. England was no longer England, but a space where we could breathe. You made England happen for me. Nobody else had that gift.

RF. I am touched by your recollection of walking around my neighborhood. I am so glad that you felt at ease in our apartment. I hope you will be there again, and that we shall have many more conversations about poetry.


Januray 3, 2003