Jeri Theriault

The Interview

Language itself plays a crucial role in many of your poems. Be it pronunciation vs. mispronunciation, interpretation vs. misinterpretation, one meaning rubbing against another, your work explores the idea of human communication in diverse, meaningful ways that often tie back to our use of written or spoken words. Can you tell us about the impact of language in your poems?

Part of my fascination with language is the Latin origin of so many English words. I minored in Latin as an undergrad because I loved its structure and sense. And Latin is always nudging its way into poems. And why not? The possibilities for sound echoes and, as you say, “interpretation vs. misinterpretation,” are rich. Arma means weapons while amor means love. In English we have armory and amorous. 

Sometimes I follow the sound of a word just to see where it takes me.  I began the poem “murmuration” as a riff on surreptitious and susurration. Their music together with their syllabic movement seem to enact their meanings and suggest the way starlings move in concert.  When I was writing “Bone Church,” I had an “aha” moment when the skeleton’s jaw “drops” open to speak “os” the Latin for both “mouth” and “bone.”  

“You have one day to dismantle what your mother left behind.” Throughout a few of these poems, there’s a drive to understand your personal history, your family legacy, and how the past influences the present. What is it about this intimate theme that inspires you? What do you hope to imply about our pasts?

Mining my personal story is a way of honoring my past, but it also accesses the way I feel about my family and culture. Though the details are uniquely mine, the emotion is universal. Everyone has a culture and a past. Two poets that inspire the kind of mining I do—not only of my own family but of my working-class background—are Philip Levine and David Rivard. My people worked in the woolen and pulp mills of central Maine. Levine’s What Work Is and Rivard’s Torque taught me that this work history was the stuff of poetry. Likewise, Sharon Olds taught me to write the ordinary and intimate details of my life as daughter, mother and woman. Sometimes, too, poets need to fill in the lost details of a life—the way I’ve done with “My Father on Iwo Jima.” I knew he’d received medals, but I didn’t know anything else about my father’s WWII experience. The quotes in this poem come from a 1995 interview with him in our hometown newspaper.

Some of the poems in my new manuscript Self-Portrait as Homestead are longer narrative poems that conjure specific houses with their titles, such as “12 Gold Street, Waterville, ME” and “12 Shipwreck Lane.” These houses both conjure the past and anchor the collection.

A few of these poems take place in Prague, a city both editors have visited and found inspiration in. What is it about the city that motivated you to write about it? Overall, what is it about experiencing a foreign culture that can enhance a poet’s perspective and empathy?

There’s something quite mystical about Prague: Kafka, the Golem, and the grim absurdity of communism. The Jewish Cemetery, with its headstones like crooked teeth. The echoes of the Velvet Revolution.

In 1998-99, while Vaclav Havel was still president, I spent a year in Prague on a Fulbright Teacher Exchange, teaching English (language) at Gymnasium Arabska. As a native English speaker, I was treated like a star. At the same time, I was a “monolinguist” among people who were usually fluent in at least three languages. Everything about living in Prague pushed me beyond the ordinary and helped me see things differently. My not knowing the language made even grocery shopping a challenge.

In 2002, I took a job as English Department Chair at the International School of Prague where I was surrounded by many languages and world views. ISP was an island of English in Prague and I was teaching IB [International Baccalaureate] English there, that is, literature and writing.

Despite spending seven years in Prague, I did not learn Czech. I could read street signs, menus and maps, but I could not engage in a conversation. I took lessons, bought books and listened to tapes, but English was at the heart of my teaching life.

During all my time in Prague, I was also part of the lively arts scene. Poets and novelists, dancers and painters. There was always something going on—a festival of Accordion Orchestras, Sunday afternoon poetry at the Jazz Club Zelezna, Seamus Heaney reading at Charles University. There were lots of opportunities to read and share and write in English in Prague.

Rosary beads, church, and suggestions of Eden all play pivotal roles in your vision, in which nature and spirituality seem to blend. Yet these references never come off as preachy. Can you tell us the role religion and spirituality play in your poetry?

I’m not religious, though it’s true my poems are full of Catholic imagery. I even have a chapbook titled Catholic (Pudding House Publications 2002). When I write about rosary beads and church, I’m accessing the imagery of my childhood. I attended a parochial school. My aunt was an Ursuline nun. My cousin was a priest. This stuff runs deep.

Rather than a practicing Catholic, I would call myself a “cultural Catholic.” I’m sure that the iconography and rituals of my Catholic childhood will continue to infiltrate my poems.

On your website at https://www.jeritheriault.com, you call yourself a Franco-American poet? What is your connection to the French culture?

My ancestors were French-Canadians who migrated to New England from Quebec to work in the factories. French was the language spoken in my father’s childhood home. He struggled with English and only became fluent when he joined the marines at age eighteen. He spoke with an accent all his life. Both my parents saw French as an immigrant language and an obstacle to success. Franco-Americans were called “Frogs.” They were the unwanted immigrants of that time and place. My maternal grandfather even changed his name from Drouin to Delaware to get a better job and avoid the Ku Klux Klan who were active in Maine in the 1920’s and 30’s and targeted French Catholics. As with religion, I feel very connected to these Franco roots, even though there was quite a lot of conflict about the culture. You could have a French name, but you shouldn’t sound French.

How do you balance your work as a poet and a collage artist? How do you balance teaching with being an artist? Are our lives full of time or perpetually running out of it?

I retired from teaching a few years ago. My husband is a composer and retired music professor. Writing and creating are at the heart of our lives and our home.

While I love “playing” with words, I also embrace the “work” of writing. I have always been a poet, and I write every day. The collage art is both more recent and (as yet) more occasional. Visual art is a meditative, tactile process that feeds my creativity.

As to time, we are most certainly running out of it. I think a good antidote to our mortality is anything that grounds us in the moment, the still points of poems or little bits of visual art, with perhaps the sound of cello practicing in the background. These acts of engagement in creating make our lives feel full and just a little less finite.