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Greg Joly is a letterpress printer and poet who lives and works in Jamaica, Vermont. His books are carried by the Elaine Beckwith Gallery, PO Box 179, Jamaica, VT 05343
Wendy Dorsel Fisher: How old is Bull Thistle Press and how did it get its name?
Greg Joly: Bull Thistle started in earnest in 1990 when my wife Mary and I moved to Jamaica, Vermont. We had a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a post-Civil War farmhouse. That bedroom became the pressroom when I found my c.1895 New Champion 600-pound foot-treadle-powered cast-iron platen press. Ed Rayher at Swamp Press spotted it at a flea market for $100. Gary Metras, the man who gave me a crash course in typesetting and make-ready at Adastra Press, eyeballed the Champion with me, and the rest was simply getting it up a flight of stairs to the apartment.
The name Bull Thistle I picked up from some early nineteenth-century agricultural texts I was going through. With the loss of a rural agricultural society in the USA, an entire language has been lost. Letterpress is going the way of illuminated manuscripts. I'm a Taurus, hence bull. A thistle is a tough, thorned weed with a deep tap root. Farmers combat the bull thistle because it spreads easily in open fields, i.e., a noxious interloper. That's what I want the press to stand for works by those outside the mainstream of cultivated poetry who stick in your side and stay with you. These are folks with deep tap roots. They pull nutrients up from a subsoil this culture is driving hard to blacktop. I provide the open field.
W: You're a one-man show, not altogether unique in small presses, letterpress, or otherwise. Does it get lonely? And do you have any dreams of expansion?
G: Loneliness never really enters the picture. Too much time is spent in design and typesetting. My only fault is as a "business man." I'm not a good one. Distribution is my bane. I hate it. I love talking books up, but not in a way that gets them into the bookstores and such. Mailing lists work the best for me. After each chapbook comes to completion, out goes a postcard. That works well. Bookstores are a waste of time because I don't push enough volume ("units") a year, and I don't use ISBN numbers or even print the price on the book. These are all decisions I've made to stay underground and small. If the press was ever to expand to a need of more than one person, I would prefer to sell the "business" and implode to a one-man again. I started Bull Thistle in order to have my hands on every stage of creation from choosing the poets, to editing, right on to design, binding, and mailings. That's the way I wanted it; that's the way I intend to keep it.
W: What's the size of your average print run?
G: Average print runs are 100 for broadsides, 200/300 for chapbooks. The broadsides are a pain in the ass to store, but they provide me a graphic challenge I enjoy taking on. Choosing the right type face and graphic intrigues me. Letterpress is the art of enhancement. An extremely subtle art. With the advent of graphics programs and even type-design packages on computers, now anything is possible. That limitless, almost instantaneousness promotes sloppy, loud, and often overbearing design layout. The relative slowness of physically manipulating type and design forces one to a slow unfolding. The eye begins to realize what can be removed and not be missed. Somewhere St. Exupery said that the perfect design is one in which nothing can be removed without damaging the whole. The great Bruce Rodgers observed that the greatest challenge to a book designer is to use no ornamentation. Do all your visual enhancement to the text with only various sizes of type. That is an exercise that is magnificent when achieved. I keep it in mind at all times, and it even informs my graphic work. Strong designs, sharp colors on textured papers. Bold, understated elegance.
W: You're doing something no one I know of does...certainly not other letterpress publishers whose books are so expensive they're collectibles and unaffordable for anyone without means. It might be a good time here to ask about your decision to charge what you do.
G: The point of Bull Thistle is not to produce ephemera for the collectors' market. And, believe me, that market is out there, and I've seen letterpresses spin into that black hole. They never climb out. The money is too good to stop milking the cow. The printed item becomes a commodity in and of itself. The only use for content resides in a "name" poet to sell the bill. I want folks on a modest income to be able to afford a handmade book. The work I labor to publish I want in people's hands and homes. So a broadside runs about $5 and chaps $10. As long as the present book I'm printing returns enough cash to purchase paper for the next book, I am well satisfied. The poet is paid 15 percent of the press run. I make no salary off the poetry. My labor is gratis.
W: Then how do you make a living?
G: Basically, [my wife Mary and I] have gone back to a single-income family structure, but our roles have been reversed. I support and augment the life within the home, and Mary supplies the cash needed to survive in a money-based economy. We are both doing what we love while pursuing our vocations.
In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely... If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it... H.D. Thoreau
W: And so we arrive at your socialist leanings...
G: Ah, the question of political leanings. I think I can safely say I'm a Machiavellian anarchist. For anyone who confuses anarchists exclusively with bomb-throwers, you need to get into the much deeper history of thought by Godwin, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Zerzan and others. Anyone who wants to read a good history of anarchism, search out George Woodcock's Anarchism. I have a well-worn Meridian edition. The whole drive behind it is the "replacement of the authoritarian state by some form of nongovernmental cooperation between free individuals." And for me this excludes any form of violent coercion, military, or otherwise.
The anarchist side is concerned with the daily life in a locality. Mutual aid plays a significant role here. What you do for and with your neighbors and how they give things back to you outside the stratifying cash economy that's of great interest to me. Hours spent trading gardening knowledge or wood-splitting or labor trades or simply knowing that someone is there when you're ill and will help get groceries. Perhaps this can function only on a small scale and that's why I've chosen to live here. It goes back to the difference between the old rural (mutual aid) lifeway and the new country cash economy. That's what is lost when money becomes the vehicle of all exchange and interchange. A mode of life based on need succumbs to the drive for acquisition.
Whenever I start to talk politics, I always recall Pound and Eliot getting entangled with fascism. Not that I have any leanings towards that repugnant terrorism, but it does remind me that a poet must tread mindfully in such venues. Rexroth wrote his excellent Communalism on the history of libertarian uprisings and communities in Western history. Thomas McGrath's poetry is infused with the radical ethic of the IWW, the International Workers of the World or "Wobblies." Gary Snyder was also steeped in that culture. Read Martin Espada's work or Barbara Smith or bell hooks.
If you are interested in how some of this ties into the poetry world, I would refer you to Alice Fulton's excellent essay in the recent Nation magazine's book issue. Read it and weep. Then dig deeper. Write beyond what you've gotten comfortable with in style and content. Most especially content. And never back off the pressure on injustice. That's what any government craves: the self-censorship of the writer. Write, then live a life that chips away at the Leviathan's artifice.
W: Do you get off on the maverick nature of what you're doing?
G: Basically, I've gotten to the point where the conventional (poems published in offset format) has no draw for me. I've learned no, have been schooled to be independent in thought and action. Bull Thistle provides that freedom. I curry no favor. This destines me to be considered a maverick or what Vermont poet Bob Arnold terms "a lone buffalo." I revel in that independence, not in being cast in someone else's role of maverick. As Ursula K. LeGuin observed: To oppose is to maintain. Therefore, I keep on with what I want to do because I'm good at it and gain joy from it. Not because I want to rub the corporate puppies' noses in it. Although, if that is a side effect, all the better!
W: How would you describe your process - working with the poets as an editor, the design decisions, serendipity, mishaps, etc.? How long does it take, start to finish, to produce a single volume?
G: I've found you have to be highly disciplined and elastic to achieve usable mishaps. A given project design constantly unfolds and reconfigures itself in my mind. Once that process enters a period of stasis, I know it's time to hit the press. Then things get fluid again and by physically manipulating type and ink I plow towards nirvana. The eye knows when the hand is done. On a few jobs I've been confined to a designed pattern. For me that is hell. I itch to break in and rearrange the furniture. On several occasions I thought I was done with a chapbook cover 12 hours and six press runs deep. But something unsettles the eye. Another hour of fiddling around and the seventh run pushes me to complete exhaustion and the final touch needed. From start to finish a chapbook takes 100 to 150 hours. When I first started printing, I attempted to keep track of hours spent on the press. But that's quantifiable nonsense to me. It's not the volume of time spent, it's the quality of results achieved. When I've heard people ask a poet how long it took him to do such and such, or how many drafts an "average" poem goes through, it saddens me. They should be asking him what passion drove him to this frenzy of creation or why he let such an unpassioned poem escape into print.
W: You published a beautiful book of poems in 1994 by the Chinese poet Yun Wang titled The Carp. Please share your story of the evolution of the book and its cover.
G: I read three poems of Yun's in a copy of the Green Mountain Review fished from the trash. Her work hit me square. Magnificent amalgam of Chinese folk tales and a woman's growing up during the Cultural Revolution. This is the type of work I crave to work with. Cultural/political poetry with great beauty and historical depth are rarely handled well. I wrote her. She sent more poems. Those new poems settled the matter for me. We went through and worked out a sequencing, some small rewrites and discussion. Scotch Roman type was used because of its erect density: a face of unequivocal statement. The cover came from a school project book Mary had. I saw this fish print and loved it. So I called an artist friend, Tadao Yamanaka, in Boston and got him excited on the idea. He went to Chinatown, bought a live carp and figured it would be dead by the time he got it home on the subway. But instead it revived after coming in out of the cold. So he iced it in the bathtub and finally put it out on the fire escape that February night. We got a call at 11 p.m. with an update. At four in the morning another call. The prints had been pulled from a live carp. It simply would not die. I got a dozen wonderful prints on rice paper to choose from. Ed Rayher made me the block to print from. Actually, two. One had a blurred image. I printed that block first in deep purple. The second clearer print was inked gold and offset a fraction to the left of the first image. The effect is the sense of a fish and its shadow projected onto a riverbed. An attempt at a 3-D effect on a flat surface. I also let the image spill from the front cover over the spine across the back and into the flyleaf at the back of the book. So as you open the book the fish flexes itself. See how crazy things get when you work by yourself? The tiniest detail contains meaning. A great joy arises from such work. Look on the spine of Gary Metras's Today's Lesson. See that boxed backwards number nine? That was the ninth volume I had printed, but I was also striving to give the book the air of an old nineteenth-century primer (made sense since these were poems about teaching high-schoolers). [Also,] Gary is a big Beatles fan. Remember that song that repeats "number nine"..."number nine"..."number nine" over and over? That's what cinched it for me...so in for one last press run to get that damn four-point number nine in the box at 3:30 a.m. I pulled an all-nighter to get that book done for a reading Gary was doing.
W: You don't advertise in places where unknown writers aspiring to publish might find you. Do you receive unsolicited manuscripts? If something knocked you out that came over the transom, would you take it on?
G: Since this is a one-man show, unsolicited manuscripts would easily overwhelm me in a matter of days. What material to print is the most elitist part of Bull Thistle. It has to be if I want to also homestead, build, write, sleep, have a relationship with Mary, etc. I keep my eyes open. Ears peeled. Sometimes a poet writes with a poem and things click from there (see Bob Kimm, F. Bjornson Stock, Charlie Mehrhoff). Or I bump into their work (Yun Wang, Todd Moore, Adrian C. Louis), or I go looking for them because I've seen their work and want to do something with them (Cortney Davis, Bob Arnold, Chris Locke). Also, since I gift my labor to the poet/project, the contact must be strong. Half-hearted work doesn't drive me. But I do feel a strong desire to publish the "unknown" or "ignored" POET. They write because it burns in them physical function that needs to be sated. The established poets have their friends and degrees and conferences and workshops and grants and awards and the APR/Poetry/New Yorker networks ad nauseam. Let them have all that. I remember Jack Gilbert commenting that we should pay all these poets to NOT write and publish. That would clear the magazines for the real work out there that never has the pedigree to make it into the dog show. For those "name" folks, if they want a letterpress book, they can hire me to do the job. Unless the work is outrageously good! Can you imagine working on Tom McGrath's Letter to An Imaginary Friend or Galway Kinnell's Body Rags or Robert Bly's Light Around the Body or Sharon Doubiago's Hard Country? That I'd be up for, and that's what I find in the ranks of the "Unknowns." Fire in the belly, blood in the sky. Some folks have observed that I take on poets who deal with violent actions and issues. I haven't purposefully done this, but the trend is there, and I think it's my way of thinking out the issues that face us in the media high plains of the late twentieth-century American myth. Not a place hospitable to poets, let alone humans. That vortex, where the creative grinds against Empire, that's where I want to be. At the glacier's face.
W: I'm interested in your thoughts on the physical relationship of reader to letterpress book, the tactile, the "felt" generally as a theme for you especially in light of the fact that you built your house entirely with hand tools, you heat only with wood, make daily contributions to a privy, etc.
G: Life is tactile. Even in the virtual cyber-world the goal is to simulate actual motion and manipulation. A physical action garners a reaction/interaction. The thought of embedding ink into paper - there's a permanence there that excites me. A flexible permanence like the Yun Wang cover. Inside, each embossed letter is a well to catch light in. It reflects the poet's meaning back out to the reader.
For me, letterpress is the process by which I've found I can manipulate physical items (type, dingbats, ink and paper) into a usable form. Creation. That's what the whole hand/eye thing is all about. The actual process of how something is done has always fascinated me. To feel the excelsior singing off the molding plane's tongue. To eat from a garden coaxed through drought, bugs, mammals, and frost. These things, these ways are exciting to me. Hopefully, the reader or visitor will sense that spirit. It is great luxury to leave such a mark in the world. A mark that enriches people's experience of life rather than scars what is left in this diminished world we've inherited. No matter what - each day produces its pound of shit. I prefer to handle my own messes creatively. We must take responsibility to pass on a bettered world. I hold no court with those who palm off that responsibility to the next generation. If we don't do something now, why the hell should anyone pick up after us or do differently in the future? That's why I do things the way I do. It is mindful. It makes me present. It is my way to thank the poets for what they've gifted me.
W: What do you think is the future of publishing in the electronic age? Where do you place the value of what you've dedicated yourself to in all that? You don't own a computer. (I know it's not because you're chicken.) Why agree to this interview at all knowing it's destined for a cyber-audience?
G: I hope I'm wrong about all this, but I'm going to let my paranoia have free reign. The thirty-five-plus crowd was the last group in the USA that got through the public schools before computers truly entered the classroom. In 1981, the year I graduated from high school, they had just brought one computer into the business department. The generation that is now graduating is the first to be completely wired from kindergarten on. So our generation has one foot in the printed book age and one in the electronic age. The new generation is a group used to and schooled in cyber-texts. Therefore, I expect that the printed word, i.e., the book, will begin to go into decline with the aging of our generation. Already we've lost the card catalogue in most libraries. Next will be the thinning of the stacks (look what they did to the San Francisco Public Library when they moved it to its new digs, or even closer to home, the Forbes in Northampton). And since the margin of profit on book publishing is so slim, as the reading public diminishes, so will the publishing houses. I don't think the printed book will go out of existence completely, but it will most likely go the way of illuminated manuscripts and calligraphy. It will be marginalized to the collector's market or ephemera production. I gain no comfort from the university presses because they are chiefly concerned with scholarly work destined for the academic market, a bit like the old medieval system. Large publishing houses will gradually retool for on-line services and text distribution. The only interesting thing that I see on the horizon is the ability of a company to electronically store a text completely typeset or in facsimile where one can order one copy and it will be printed out to order. My concern is...who will determine what texts will and will not be available? As to letterpress, it dropped off the screens before this all took place. Offset killed it in the sixties. Only a name poet such as Kinnell can demand in his contract a book printed from hot lead. So at least a few folks can see what the old "art" was all about.
The value of what I do resides in the joy I get from doing it and the enjoyment the poets and their readers get from handling such an item. It's a reminder of a different time. A different way of viewing the world. And this is where my disinterest in computers begins. In order to enter the Temple of On-line Information, you must be trained to manipulate an operating system. That mode of operation therefore structures the manner in which you think. Now, if you use this machine daily and have done so for years, then the patterns in which the machine causes you to think aren't plainly visible. That structuring of thought is what I find most anathema. I have a very strongly developed spatial ability and I find the computer confining and cumbersome. The parameters in which it must be used are limits that I cannot abide. If folks want to look into how the computer might affect the developing brain structures of children, take a look at the work of Jane Healy.
That brings me to...why be cyber-interviewed? Well, it is your medium of communication and publishing. I cannot stop the electronic eel. But just as some well-to-do people have taken on homesteading and voluntary Simplicity, perhaps someone will revisit or enter into a new way of viewing the world through this talk. Does this sound overly grand? What other reason is there to write or speak than to make one's views known? I have been invited into your house. For that I am honored and grateful. That won't stop me from taking a dim view of computers or stop me from telling you that, but the "cyber-audience" is still individual human beings. And I will never pass up a chance to visit.
W: On another topic you hate the term "Country Poet" and won't be pigeonholed there. What's particularly odious about that title for you? Who's your idea of the quintessential CP?
G: The embodiment of what-not-to-be for me is Maxine Kumin. Horse-riding poems the dead giveaway. In Southern New England, the only form of "agriculture" that will survive the suburbanites' gentrification will be riding schools. Pleasure agriculture in the fine American tradition of the Gentleman Farmer. If you want to see more of these countrified trifles, check out the New Yorker's weekly stable. A Hobson's choice. Donald Hall, after String Too Short to be Saved and Kicking Leaves, fell into the soup. Go back to Kinnell's Body Rags and taste the salt of the rural there. Then read his bullfrog pond fuck poem and enter the "country poem." If you want that rural world, go find Hayden Carruth's Brothers, I Loved You All and read "The Chain Saw Poem" or "Paragraphs." Dig out David Lee's Drinking and Driving or Porcine Canticles or Day's Work. Blood, sweat and guts there. Pitch into Bob Arnold's Where Rivers Meet or old Wendell Berry A Place on Earth, Old Jack, Farming. Or Carolyn Chute's novels. You can't go back to the country after you've set roots deeply into the rural. Basically, the quintessential CP is any poet who simply skims the pond's surface goes for a sad, tone-poem style of lost childhood glimpsed through the beauty of Nature. Beauty is fine and all, but it reminds me of a line from Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain: "Marrying a woman for her beauty is about as smart as eating a bird for its song." Too many poets eat the songbird. So get into that damn pond I don't care how deep the bottom mud is. Country is a product to be purchased. Rural you got to live through, work on, and get knocked around by. Then you can get past that gauze curtain of beauty and get down to joy.
W: Would you mind sharing "Poem to Mi So from Pu Pu," one of my favorite of your poems, with us?
G: This poem is a response to the West Coast School of Far East Poetics and Atmospherics. Rexroth got the ball rolling and then Snyder and the Beats picked up on it. But in recent years, as practiced by Sam Hamill and co., the form has gotten thin. Only a hazy, tepid, elegiac overlay is left. I wanted to use the form but blow open the content and diction. Get the old Zen master's dope slap back in there.
W: Do you have any advice to writers on working with their editors? Vice versa?POEM TO MI SO FROM PU PU
The wind pulls moon clouds
in cream cheese swirls
The small cabin rots in its sump
Mi So returns from gathering empties in town
The stove teeters--a three-legged dog
its mouth hinged wildly
He kindles the fire with kerosene
that catches up the chimney's throat
In the draft, Pu Pu's note
rattles off the card table
By the light of the blazing hut,
he reads...
Mi So-
One gross of empties cashed.
Got bottle to celebrate w/ you,
but no one home. So I leave
you my empty. Go fish-
Pu Pu
G: If an editor wishes to change your content (the moral fiber of your work), jettison him or her with all haste. An editor is only there to help strengthen how you're saying something, NOT control what you're saying. On the editor's side, you've got to know when to stop pushing for changes. The poet is the final arbiter. If you still want to change too much, why go for a poem that doesn't answer the bill? Writers, PLEASE can the pedigree pages of publications. Those who give a shit about such things are more politicos than poets. The sphere of poetry in which I choose to work garners no power/connections, prestige or money. But it's got brain and muscle, piss and vinegar. This is the root poetry that a society needs to survive, like the poems Rasmussen found among the Netsilik on his Arctic travels. If ever an established/name poet came to me with a manuscript, he or she would have to pass the same editorial muster. So, approach an editor as a human being: equal to equal. Do not grovel or bow to demands that run counter to your grain. And remember all this if you ever take on the editor's mantel. If you want to see just what a fine editor can be, go out and search for the anthologies that Walter Lowenfels did. Today's collections are glib in comparison.
W: You're especially dedicated to publishing marginalized voices, some of whom have never been published. I'm assuming correct me if I'm wrong that you find this more exciting than fostering the ongoing careers of more well-known writers, some of whose poems you've published in broadside.
G: These poets who excite are marginalized by a ghetto structure. Look at the Academy of American Poets. How do they represent what's vital in poetry today? They represent the career ladder of power. And we allow them that power by attempting to join or storm their barricades. Leave them to their towers. Now, go over here, and get on with the work you need to do. If publishing opportunities don't exist, create them. Don't wait at the gate for scraps that meat is poisoned. Look how the work of those inside has lost all life juices on such a diet. The hunger has left the belly, and time is spent at parlor tricks reviving sonnets and sestinas and iambs and other gimmicks to amuse their friends. If that's what they choose, fine. Meantime, there are folks out here living real lives with all the attendant difficulties and from that arises a poetry that shows every muscle and guides us through. With me these poets have earned their chance at a book. The famous have earned nothing by their fame. If they don't burn with the passion I see outside the Poetry Establishment's gates, what time should I expend on them? None.
W: You talk about formal verse like it's a game or a cadaver or both. Are you saying the container's outlived its usefulness or are you angry at what poets using it today are filling it with?
G: Formal verse suffers from some of the same failings as a formal party. Everyone looks good, but no one enjoys him or herself. And even the term formal "verse" sets it apart from poetry. A cadaver can be an immensely instructive item for study. Look what happened to art when the Renaissance artists got into the morgues. They emerged with living muscle from dead tissue. I simply do not feel that alchemy going on in formal verse today. Also, personally, I can't follow a recipe to its conclusion without tampering. I change the spices or the mix of flours or the type of liquid added. A recipe is a template. You don't eat a recipe: you eat what is created. So, when you have a poem structure of iambic pentameter, dactylic hexameter, a Petrarchan sonnet, or a sestina and all you do is fill in the right boxes with proper stresses and slant rhymes so what?! The form is not poetry: it's content that fires the passion that drives form into song. Look at McGrath's "Letter." He uses a six-beat line, and the drive it gives the poem propels it with a blinding love. But as he observed: if you write a bad sonnet, the effect of formality increases the badness. Or read the beautiful translation of Homer by Richard Lattimore. He was boxed by the Homeric form, but, because he completely inhabited the Greek and had a poet's soul, he was able to sing in form, in English, impassioned in the long shadows of the Greek ships on the wide beaches of the Aegean. But look at the reams and reams of poetic scales that are practiced in the workshop world. Painters know well enough that preliminary sketches are only a vehicle to the final work. If a poet conquers a difficult form, this does not guarantee poetry. In fact, the dizzy heights of form can induce a trance in which the poet goes on and on long after the vision is past. In Kinnell's last collection he presents several poems that use the Persian ghazal form. Unfortunately, his content doesn't breathe life into the form. And look what has happened to haiku.
IIn no way am I against form per se. Poetry is form, and there exists a misnomer in people's conception of free verse. For me each poem reveals its own structure that enhances its impact. When a line or word does not belong in the unfolding form, it bellows out its alienness. Out it must go before it stampedes the rest of the poem. I think this is most especially tricky in the long poem. The underlying structure needs to provide a heartbeat. Whitman has that cadence.
Or read William Everson or Pound's The Pisan Cantos. In shorter work, formal verse most often is the court dress that floats Ophelia long enough to get her out into deep water where the poem finally goes down blubbering a ditty to its muddy bottom. What gets me angry is that poets are not defining new forms for themselves to cultivate. They seem to prefer filling old vessels and then selling their wares to a limited public fearful of any innovations. If formal versers are so concerned for their craft, why have they not embraced rappers and hip-hop artists who have completely recharged these old forms? It's the content that scares the hell out of them, and it is precisely this content which their verse lacks and that makes it lifeless. They get caught up in the Narcissean backwaters of self-emulation. Thus they attempt to harness passion in an ornate snuff box. And when you mis-harness any wild thing, in all likelihood you'll make it lame.Rhymes and rhymers pass away--poems distill'd from foreign
poems pass away,
The swarms of reflectors and polite pass, and leave ashes;
Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but the soil
of literature;
America justifies itself, give it time--no disguise can
deceive it, or conceal from it--it is impassive enough,
Only toward the likes of itself will it advance to meet them,
If its poets appear, it will in due time advance to meet them--
there is no fear of mistake,
(The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferr'd, till his
country absorbs him as affectionately as he
has absorb'd it.)
As I Sat Alone, By Blue Ontario's Shore
Section 13
W: "That poem needed to be written, just like that cordwood needed to be stacked." Your quote, more or less. With that statement in mind, could you tell us more about your feelings toward your own creative process?
G: To learn to use a tool you need to use it. Find someone that has the skill. Watch them. Try it. Ask questions. Try again. Visualize the steps. Practice. Live with it. Same with poets. What I see in many poets who do send poems to me is that they haven't read Eliot, Williams, H.D., Moore, Pound, Rexroth, Kinnell, Knight, Hughes, Neruda, Creeley, DiPrima, Simic, Jeffers, Kerouac, Welch, etc. They really haven't studied what's out there. They speak in clichιs and fail to build out beyond where others have been.
Perhaps it's the workshop syndrome. I don't know for certain. I haven't been privy to that world. But I see mimics who get lost in the maze of the Master's voice. Or I find that people are only at surface level. They don't seem to know enough to drive under, how to break the surface tension and discover the underground river that feeds the springs up above. (Some people give Bly hell, but very few seem to understand what he's up to.) So I constantly read and reread. When I was building the house, I pretty much stopped writing. I was unsatisfied with the rural poems I'd been writing. No, more correctly, I knew that that style/form would always be with me whenever I needed it. But I wanted to dig deeper. So I read Tom McGrath and Ted Hughes and the Surrealists and Neruda and Kazantzakis and Szymborska and others in the esoteric traditions. Charlie Mehroff's work has also been immensely helpful. Those guides taught me how to safely dive in deep water. As to working with the language, molding it to a use: it's the same as using any tool. Work with it to learn to use it properly. Throw out the practice pieces. Live with the poem in your belly until it has gestated. The most difficult part for me has been to trust myself to know when the work is done. That internal trust must weigh all comments, criticisms and rewrites in such a manner that does not destroy the passion which drives the work, but it also must allow for changes that may pitch the poem even higher and more blindingly. I don't write poems daily. I've gone six, eight, ten months without a poem slipping out. There are plenty of other things in my life to take up the slack. But when the writing jag hits it can last all day or two weeks. You never know until you're at the other end. In my book, Hand Labor, the three big poems, "Stone Dance, "Farm Days" and "Sugar Bush", all came in two or three days. Bang there they were. So when I'm writing, I'm writing. When I'm not I never think about the fact that I'm not writing. I study. Think things through. Get the tools sharp for the next project.
W: Do you see yourself doing this for the long haul? If the climate for poetry were to change, move outside the stuffy academy to an open field of an audience clamoring for the stuff you champion, how can you picture your business changing? Do you ever imagine personal or professional advantages, that aren't just fiscal, in having to answer in some way to the larger marketplace?
G: Face it. There will always be a stuffy academy. If nothing else, those walls give the next generation of poets something to push against. Any successful alternative will be hybridized into the next Academy. It happened to the Beats and Grunge and poetry slams and cowboy poetry. Commercialization. Outside becomes in. Yin and Yang. Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
Why should I ever answer to the marketplace? What would be the gain? Wasted hours hobnobbing? Perfecting the clone poem? I like keeping low to the ground, below the reach of radar of the great American marketplace. It holds no charms to soothe me. I would prefer to have to work manually for money to print poetry than to succumb to market forces. Just as I have decided to not enter the cyber-world due to the price of admission, the same is true here. I find the terms "poetry market" or "poetry biz" to be oxymorons.
W: You're known for jawing at the P.O. or town meetings with the locals and having a passion for history, a commitment to spending time with older people whose oral record is a part of their legacy. Are you an old soul stuck in the wrong time warp?
G: In the first place, I am a local. I am also a French Canadian Pole. Still, this is the earth I was born to. We have been fortunate that the way in which we wish to live speaks to the older generations, and therefore we are accepted into the community as far as they wish to accept us. We are honored by that and enjoy it immensely.
I recall gathering loose hay for an old man in Mt. Vision, New York. He had homesteaded for eighty years. One of the last guys around who knew how to harvest grain crops with a turkey-wing cradle scythe. We talked and talked and talked. Finally, as we talked out our last, he came over to the truck window and said, "Come over and visit anytime. That's the problem with today's world. Nobody knows how to visit." Perhaps that's why I seem to have an "old soul." There are rural ways which are quickly giving way to the money-besotted suburban migration to the country. We have to be very aware of what we are losing with the loss of the rural. Go back to all those mid-seventies Foxfire books, especially the magazines. All those folks are gone. Dead. And we let them die by not learning from them and not curbing our consumptive society. We are history now. What we do matters. Don't wait to save something. Live it. The only way to conserve is to embody.
The nature of a visit is such that you can never tell beforehand how long it will last or how far afield you will roam. This has been good pasturage. My thanks to you all.
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Wendy Dorsel Fisher is a poet who lives in southern Vermont and cybercommutes for the television studios in Hollywood from a cabin high atop Turkey Mountain.