I have read Maria Benet's blog alembic for quite some time; when I saw that Benet had published her first book of poems, The Mapmaker of Absences, I ordered a copy. The poems moved me to write an appreciation of the book (see above) and I thought, too, it would be interesting to talk with the poet about her work. I had planned to interview Benet when she and her husband were in Madison this past July, when I went out to dinner with them, but you know how poets get to talking and one thing leads to another and there was no time to conduct the interview face-to-face. So I left my questions with Benet, who graciously agreed to answer them via e-mail. This, then, is that interview: my questions prepared on July 20th and her answers delivered on August 8th. I completed my appreciation of the poems before Benet sent me her answers to the questions, and I have not revised what I wrote because of her responses; so between the appreciation and the interview you will see some complementary passages, and some that stand in contrast to each other – as the reader and the poet sometimes stand in contrast to one another. Indeed, Benet appended a note to her answers when she sent them. "Tom," she said, "I have been reading and re-reading all your very thoughtful, considered, and thorough questions, and I only hope that I have answered them adequately for you to get a full picture. Some of the questions you ask me about the making of my poems truly amazed me because I had no idea my poems took on such shapes and tones for readers. But answer them I will try, so here we go. If I get a bit testy in places, forgive me... [It's] not that I am not truly grateful for this excellent opportunity you have provided for me to really take a look at what I consider to be my ars poetica... or the way I make my poems." So here we go. Montag: (Q1) Where were you born, where have you lived, how did you arrive here (in all senses of the question)?
Benet: I was born in Cluj, Romania. To be more exact, in terms of a regional flavor that might be familiar to Americans, if not from life, then from Hollywood renditions of it, I was born in Transylvania, a province of sorts that over the centuries has been everything: an independent country, an occupied land, the outpost of empires, and home to exiled Romans, Hungarians, Turks, Germans, Armenians, Jews, Romanians, Gypsies.
I spent most of my childhood in Cluj, in the heart of Transylvania. In fact, I lived there until the age of 14, when my mother and I moved to Budapest, Hungary. This was not an easy move for me, nor was it easy for my mother. I was very "territorial" as a child and fiercely proud and completely enamored with my place of birth. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. My mother, though, who was born in Budapest, was experiencing an increasing number of problems at work as a Hungarian. She ran a pharmaceutical research institute and she had strict work ethics. Form what I can remember, her ethics and drive didn’t sit well in a Romania that ran most of its economy on the idea of 5-year plans instead of the actual work it would have taken to bring those plans to fruition.
To make a long story short, she lost her job and was forced to work at a construction site for some months before she could apply for a passport to leave the country. As my parents happened to be divorced - even though given a housing shortage they kept sharing the apartment in which we lived - she and I eventually were granted permission to leave, and we moved to Budapest.
It was in Budapest that my father’s cousin’s wife from Canada visited me and decided with my mother that I should move to Vancouver. The paperwork for that took some time, but shortly after I turned 17, the week the first man landed on the Moon (in 1969), I landed in Vancouver, Canada....
I grew attached to living in Vancouver, where eventually I attended both the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, and would probably be still living there, had I not met my husband Charlie, who at the time was working at Simon Fraser University. We moved to California in 1985, when he received a job offer from a software company.
Hard to believe now, but California has become the place for me where I have lived the longest in my life. I suppose it is the place where I have the most tangled roots now - as it is here that I had my family and raised my two sons.
Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 2, below
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