Rebecca Seiferle

interviewed by Charles Adés Fishman

What first moved you to write?

I think what first moved me to write poetry was a sense of being deeply inarticulate, and a feeling of being deeply connected to the world as it is, particularly the natural world. I first was aware how much I wanted to write at the age of nine when I was given a school assignment that required writing three quatrains about our favorite place. My favorite place was a spot  in the Vermont woods where the forest opened to a sunny hill that was full of meadow grasses and wild flowers. The small hill overlooked a stream that, turning a curve, broke over several downfallen trees into a deep pool. I was frustrated by the form of the assignment, of course, but I also became aware of how I could not express how the water cascading into the pool caught the light, or how the currents seemed to flow through me. The sense of connection I felt to the natural world, its movement, its light, the correspondences between my feeling and what I looked at and felt moving through me was deeply inarticulate. And that sense of frustration, more than anything else, made me feel how much I wanted to be able to write, how necessary that expression was to me.

Did the impetus to write poetry come from your parents, friends, school, community, reading (or as a reaction to all of the above)?

My happy moments with my  mother when I was little involved her reading to me: Bible stories in some version for children,  as well as some stories and poems, for instance by  Robert Louis Stevenson. I think I was much imprinted by hearing literature; the sound of poetry entered my body. I was also affected by the subject matter — terrified really, for how terrible some of the Bible stories were, even in those expurgated versions. I remember in, later years, joking with a friend, another poet, how I had been “cursed with a Biblical imagination” as a result. My mother was later to write a volume of children's poems, though she never published them. My father too wanted to write; after he and my mother married, they moved to Concord, MA, where he wanted to be a poet and commune with the spirit of Thoreau. He was to return to writing all of his life, often writing ‘poems’ that mostly resembled the aphorisms of Kahil Gibran, though also sometimes trying his hand at fiction. As a result, I grew up in a house where writing was valued and where the word mattered a great deal, perhaps too much, since many an argument (and there were many arguments) would send both people to the dictionary as if the quarrel could be resolved there. This isn’t to say though that my parents were necessarily supportive; my writing and early publication was met by  discouragement, particularly from my father. Paradoxically, I grew up feeling the “word” mattered, greatly, almost religiously, and also feeling that language seemed to belong to others, as if it bore within it a buried history of wounding and exclusion. I was often hurt by words. At that moment in the Vermont woods, I felt how necessary it was to have my own language, to be able to express the wholeness and deep sense of connection I felt. Perhaps I should say that, as a child, I had the sense of living three lives: an unhappy one in the warring house of my parents, an invisible one in school where I was an A student but always the new kid (since we moved every six months or so), and a happy life outdoors. Wherever we lived, I would spend hours wandering the woods either alone or with a group of other kids who would follow me around and play the elaborate games of my imagination. Writing for me was the connection with that ‘other’ life, the happy one, where I was alone or with company in the forest of my imagination and felt connected to all that is.

Were your early influences the classic European and American poets, like Donne, Shelley, Whitman, and Dickinson, or did you turn to 20th-century poets for inspiration?

The first  poem I ever memorized, when I was fourteen, was one by Baudelaire, so I was first influenced by a number of  French writers: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Desnos. It’s interesting that some of the poets who have influenced me the most have written in other languages, and this was to continue, once I started reading Vallejo and Neruda in the Spanish when I was nineteen. Eventually, much later, I began translating Vallejo, and I think that encounter which continued from translating  his Trilce (Sheep Meadow Press, 1992) to The Black Heralds (Copper Canyon, 2003) has shaped and changed my sense of language. Only Dickinson and Whitman in the English have stayed with me as long, and it was Dickinson who made the first impression with her ability to evoke complex emotional states while avoiding context almost altogether. Still, I can’t say that any of these poets were sources of inspiration for my work; it was more the sense of their engagement with language, how it became a sort of molten element in each of their particular crucifixes, that impressed me. Later, in my early thirties, I learned German because I felt that to really read Paul Celan it was necessary to read the original.  One side of my mother’s family was of German extraction; my great-grandmother spoke German to the German POWs who worked in the sugar beet fields of Colorado, and I had a great reluctance toward the language, almost an aversion, as if learning it were to take up too much. I could only take on that historical and familial weight of language in order to hear that “message in a bottle” as Celan called all poetry.

Which contemporary poets have published work that you most respect? Why?

I’m always reading. I’d have to say one of the best works I’ve read in the past couple of years is Gloria Gervitz’s Migraciones/Migrations translated by Mark Schafer (Junction Press). I was particularly struck by the work because it took 27 years to write, and each of the sections has the sound and feel of a different age of life within this organic whole; her use of the second person is also incredibly evocative, since it is various, sometimes a particular person, sometimes her mother, sometimes a lover, sometimes a general person, and it is also a kind of personal diaspora, testifying to the wandering of a people. We have a lot of literary events in Tucson, but one of the best readings I’ve attended is Alice Notley’s reading, given here last spring. I’d wanted to hear her for a long while, having been struck by her work on a number of occasions and was very moved by her reading, which was like the embodiment of a kind of pain and sharpness, but incredibly musical. I have to say though that I am often not so taken with contemporary poetry, which often seems to be preoccupied more with writing the next poem, than the truth of feeling. I was much taken with the work of a number of emerging poets in the emerging poet issue I published in late 2006 in The Drunken Boat, www.thedrunkenboat.com, particularly Cathy Stonehouse, Lilah Hegennauer, Tamiko Beyer,  Melissa Buckheit (her chapbook “Arc” appears in the current issue), and Anna Moschovakis. I know I've mentioned only women, but I think women are doing some of the most innovative and interesting writing out there. And also younger writers, who often have difficulty finding publishing opportunities because of the domination of many publishing lists by established poets and publishers’ lack of commitment or interest in publishing poetry.

What are the chief concerns that are reflected in your poetry?

Well, my poetry is often concerned with the intersection between the personal and the public, and by “public,” I mean the historical and cultural, a weight which language continues to bear within it. Most of my poems are written out of a particular moment where the significance of the moment seems to be coming from somewhere else, and that “somewhere else” is the political and the historical, the social and cultural constructs that have oppressed and marginalized the individual sensibility.  Language continues to bear within its “roots” these woundings, and these woundings are re-enacted and re-afflicted in the present by those who wield language unknowingly.

What are your plans for your poetry? Are there any long-range projects you are currently working on?

In the last year I’ve been working on a series of “Other: poems” which combine text and image. I began making images in photoshop, often starting out with a micro jpg taken from a nude photo and then expanding the jpg and altering it with the various capabilities of the program. The images are non-representational, highly textured, though they have evolved to include drawing upon them, and have become more complex visually. I had been writing a long poem that seemed to unravel like a breath and at a certain point realized that the poem, or bits of it, belonged with the images. It was interesting to me how the image became an other presence, exerting a kind of force like the world, as the weight of language had previously done in my work, which required that text change, often becoming simpler, more compressed, more intense. At the same time, the text seemed to exert a similar pressure upon the image. I have about 40-50 of these “Other” poems, and call them that because they seemed ‘other’ than conventional poems but also because they have the presence of an “other” within them. I am a little nervous about this work, which does not fit the usual modes of publication, but which also seems to be on the threshold between art and poetry, and so challenges me continually. At the same time, since I’ve been here in Tucson, I’ve expanded my interests into art and ekphrasis greatly, having visited several art classes as a teacher, and also now teaching the Philosophy and Theory of Art. This is both very new, and a reclaiming of something, since in my early twenties, I both painted and sculpted in wood and then left it. At the same time, I feel that this new work is a departure too from my usual poetic preoccupations. Rather than arguing with, or feeling the need to dismantle, the ancient stories of the myths, the historical and social inheritances that continue to echo in language, I feel that I can leave them behind, step over the threshold into some more direct utterance. I am reminded of visiting the photographer Marian Roth at her studio in Provincetown in the summer of 2006. She was busy preparing canvases for her new interest in painting, and painting she said was “like being an infant.” She also mentioned that a number of people wondered why she was undertaking a new art, since she was already known as a photographer. She had, of course, begun photographing — first her underwater series of nudes, then her pinhole photography series — in exactly the same way, launching forth into the new. One of the challenges of poetry and all art for me has always been to follow the poem’s intention, to follow that breath wherever it might lead me. I suppose it’s analogous to wandering freely through the woods as a child wherever interest or inspiration might take me. But it does also require sometimes giving up one’s expertise, one’s sense of ease, and becoming an ‘infant.’ At the same time, I’ve also written some more conventional poetry, sans image, which has been interesting as well, marking the difference between a work that requires only language and one that does not.