Alice B. Fogel
The Interview
Your poems are very different from one another, but in all your work, we sense a careful balance between saying something specific and letting the reader infer the specific meaning. How do you navigate ambiguity in your work?
Wait—my poems aren’t clear? Well OK, maybe not, but they do each follow a very poem-specific logic that I work to wind through them, which I don’t think is in any way “hidden,” at least not any more than a mountain can be hidden behind water droplets. This is true even with the much denser, possibly baroque, word-heavy poems I write. I usually try to build a poem by images, and language and its associations and sounds. Maybe I’m holding some kind of visual thing in my mind, usually something from nature, and that picture is the concrete manifestation of an abstract vision. I don’t want to explain or connect all the dots, although poems may become arguments of a sort, or at least assertions, or at least wish lists. Linear narration isn’t interesting to me as an intention in my writing, and I think it’s totally possible for nouns and verbs, phrases and syntactical movement, to keep the poem spinning in centripetal force so it doesn’t fly off in every direction. I also have usually liked to come up with a new structural imperative each time I start a new series, something that frames and supports its themes—although of course sometimes the form comes intuitively, growing out of the making. Imposing constraints like these, and a whole bunch of other ones I’m keeping secret, helps me create and surprise myself, without getting too tied down to the “about.”
“I can reach the points of opposing truths.” Does this describe the artist’s, and in fact, every individual’s responsibility to others?
You found that line in “The Fringe,” which takes a form that shows varying ways to see, by stripping away/building layers. We do this all the time in revealing and concealing our own feelings and experience, in relation to self-awareness as well as what we allow others to see of us, not to mention how much of others’ experience we are able to take in. I find “fringe” to be a wonderfully rich word and image. The way a fabric’s fringes, or the fringes of a society, in form and definition are fluidly separate while necessarily connected, or solid surrounded by emptiness, seems like something we might aspire to while we’re here. It’s a balance we could strike, of near and far, individual and community, independence and attachment, spirit and embodiment. Opposing truths aren’t just disagreeing viewpoints; they’re truths! In this poem, I hadn’t intended to be applying that line to our responsibility to others so much as one’s own acceptance of life’s dissonance, so that we can suffer losses and still live fully, but the paradox could certainly be taken that way—which brings us back to your first comment about the reader inferring!
What did the five years serving as New Hampshire Poet Laureate mean for you? What did you learn? “Only poets read poetry” is something we hear often in the community these days. Although not a literal truth, what do you think of this? Why does the American culture seem to produce both a unique and abundant supply of moving and innovative poetry, and a general lack of interest for it?
These last four questions, though asked in two sections, combine for me, so I’ll answer them together. I’d been teaching reading and writing workshops all over New Hampshire (and elsewhere) for years, but still, something shifted for me when I started showing up in the role of state poet laureate. People really respond to the title. It opened doors for me to work in a lot of different settings and situations, and it showed me that poetry is alive and large in our culture, for people of all kinds of backgrounds, ages, and lifestyles. It’s not just in bookstores, print and online journals, cafes and pubs. Poetry is part of the lives of prisoners, immigrants and refugees, artists, librarians, living room salon and yurt circle attendees, people in retirement homes and places of worship, students at every level and their teachers. There are the slam and spoken word worlds, the needs of the dying and grieving, the yoga classes, and of course weddings and funerals and other ceremonies and commemorations. People know poetry serves as both ballast and balloon. When I made a list of regular reading venues around this little state, it was several pages long. More people are showing up for online readings in huge numbers now; people read their daily poems for comfort, inspiration, joy, thought, and recognition. It’s not as if I didn’t know all this; it’s just that I was surprised, humbled, and personally rewarded by the magnitude of interest in poetry I saw while I was the poet laureate.
On the other hand, I’d like to point out (borrowing a line from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem I read as a kid) that the world is so full of a number of things—so if there are people who aren’t into poetry, that’s all right; let’s just hope they’re into something else that moves them to empathy and pause.
One of my most-repeated peevish speeches is about how the notion of “accessibility” in a piece of art is a red herring. Accessible to whom? Buildings and opportunities—and art—should be accessible to all, but each work of art? It wouldn’t even make sense for me to say art doesn’t need to be—or even benefit us by being—accessible, in the sense of “easily understood.” Are the mechanics of car engines accessible to everyone? No, but we all still drive cars. Just get in the poem and go for a ride. Is astrophysics accessible to everyone? No, but we still gaze at the stars. Sit still and watch the poem strobing. My particular preference is for a poem I never exactly get, other than on a gut level. But working with so many different people taught me that we need to stop being stuffy and limited in our judgment of what a poem should be. What I want from a poem today may be different from what you want from a poem, or what either of us will want tomorrow. Thank goodness there are poems for everyone and all times.
We are fascinated by the description of Strange Terrain in your bio. Would you please tell us a little more about this book, which seems to align with the Inflectionist aesthetics?
Well, having said all that I just said, there are clearly more ways more people could expand the possibilities of what a poem can do for/to/with them. A little negative capability can go a long way in life. That’s what my book Strange Terrain addresses. It grew out of reading discussion programs I did for the NH Humanities Council, at which attendees would have lively invested talks with each other about literature and then, when a poem came along, it was like they’d all turn into clams. Or ostriches. The book and the workshops I do around it are based on three main parts: Demystification, through familiarizing with a poet and her process, the how and the why but not the what of poetry; Information—8 specific paths of entry into a poem, such as Words, Sounds, Images, or Emotions; and the most important part, Remystification—a reminder that you can learn a great deal about what makes poems and still not “get” them, because the mysterious nature of what poetry says and how it says it—what often cannot be paraphrased—is its lifeblood, just as is the case with so much of deep value in life. I wouldn’t want it any other way. Not incidentally, nothing in the book is about what a poem “means,” and yet of course everything in a poem is what it means.
From ampersands to colons, unexpected white space to varied line lengths, your poems seem in a constant state of linguistic experimentation. Can you describe your structuring process? How do you know when to retain and when to break grammatical norms?
Structure, for me, makes the rhythm, the melody, and the harmony of a poem’s song. Every phrase, every mark of punctuation or lack of it, every space, line, and line break, perhaps in subconscious conversation with literate expectations of syntax, has a time span within the time signature of the poem, and speaks an emotional message. I’m just nuts about all that stuff. (I talk a lot about these things in the chapter on Shape in Strange Terrain.)
I said a little about this in the beginning of this interview, but I’m not sure I can answer your question “how do you know when to retain and when to break grammatical norms” because it’s not exactly a knowing. Partly I play with these choices because it’s just plain exciting and fun to compose this way; and partly I make those choices for the effect that seems right for the poem—since everything has an effect, even the appearance of the poem on the page, or the breaths you take when you speak it aloud. In any given poem, at what pace should we move through and take in the language and emotion? How can the structure deepen everything else about the poem? More than sentences, lines and their breaks afford units of thought, followed by the next and next units of thought, and if I break them in certain ways, and if the reader hears those breaks where I’ve put them, that can multiply strata of sense. “Even with that moon tonight low & bending.” “Even with that moon tonight low & bending its light.” Two different things have happened, in syncopation.
Other than space itself, my favorite form of punctuation is probably the colon. It’s so inviting! Like a blaze on a tree on a trail, it beckons: come on, this way, keep going. It says there is no complete ending, and everything is connected, like John Muir’s image of roots: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
Has your writing process changed during this chaotic, terrifying time of disease and quarantine? How do you retain your creative inspiration?
Honestly, I have barely been writing, but I’m all right with that for now. I go through in-between times every bunch of years, but I’m lucky that retaining inspiration, motivation, and energy isn’t an issue for me. I have a choice of things that help carry me through in “flow,” for my sanity and serenity, to the extent that such states can be possible or even permitted during the grief of such a time as we’re in—not just from the instability of living in a pandemic but from the stark consequences of centuries of institutionalized racism, hatred, and divisiveness, and the decades of willfully blind abuse of natural resources too. My daily or weekly creative outlets, among other things include music, long hikes, and kayaking near loons and eagles and the occasional otter. And I’ve been making a quilt that’s an abstracted scene of New England forests in all seasons. Hand sewing is absorbing, physical, and nonverbal, and that seems to be what I need right now. I also read poetry every day. “The Slowdown” is a great companion, as always, and so are the daily missives from Great Big Story. And there’s always live cams on the internet of seals, birds, and other creatures—way better even than Netflix.