Montag: At your poetry reading in Fond du Lac on September 6th, you mentioned that when you finished Mead you became depressed because you didn't know where to go next with your work, and whatever you tried seemed to fizzle out. Then, you said, you realized: "Shit, I can go backwards." Would you explain what you mean by going backwards?
Elder: The summer issue of Beloit Poetry Journal has eight examples of what I meant, two of which can be accessed on Verse Daily. Three more will surface in The National Poetry Review. I’m working on the 24th of 26 right now. It begins with zabwino, a gorgeous word from a friend’s native tongue, Chichewa. The last line’s first letter will be a.
I hope it turns out that Mead is the first of a trilogy. I plan to write the third, the middle section, in spring, while on sabbatical. Incidentally, I’ll be engaged in a bit of research, a bit of travel with my wife to Las Vegas, a short stay at the Bellagio, our fourth.
Montag: You were a student of Lucien Stryk's at Northern Illinois University. He is a Zen poet and has been interested in place and middlewestern writing. What have you taken into your work and your life out of your encounter with Stryk? How do Zen and place figure into your writing?
Elder: Stryk is my spiritual father, period. It’s complicated. I explain it all, a rather involved story, in "The Moral Authority of Lucien Stryk," which is one of three essays from writers on their mentors I published in Seems, my magazine, and which I read when Bill Heyen, Jeff Elzinga, and I were granted the opportunity to offer a tribute to Lucien at the AWP convention in Chicago. The essay can be accessed here: http://www1.lakeland.edu/seems/pages/34.htm .
As to how "place" figures in my writing, I don’t mean to be contrary, Tom, but the fact of the matter is that it has progressively had a smaller role in my development as writer. I tend to say to myself that the earth is relatively finite when compared with the vastness of the imagination and the "places" there that remain to be explored. On the other hand, I suspect that our brand of imagination is indigenous to earth.
Now, maybe I don’t think much about place because I’ve lived in the Midwest for all but two years of my life—while I was stationed in the military on the West Coast and, later, on Okinawa. Place, paradoxically, perhaps has less value to me (I’m less conscious of it) as long as I’m in Wisconsin. Despite having been born in Beloit and having lived there until the age of three or four, I spent the overwhelming majority of my formative years in Illinois, where Wisconsin seems like Mecca to most. And here I am—back in heaven.
Montag: Have you found recurring themes and concerns emerging in your work over the years? What are they?
Elder: Poetry is my prayer, pure and simple, much of the time. I’m trying to get a glimpse—from as many angles as I can conceive—of this thing humans call God and to possess some meager awareness, at least, of why it manifests itself in the manner it appears to have chosen, as if the Ultimate Phenomenon would stoop to choose in the first place. I guess I can’t help myself in this regard. I’m from a long line of Methodists on both sides, though at thirteen I refused confirmation because I couldn’t say the Apostle’s Creed. My mother just shook her head with a "Karl Curtis, you’re deep." My father looked at me for a few moments, no doubt thinking, and then the three of us went on about our business.
Montag: Would you talk about the place of poetry in the world? What is poetry's role? What is the role of the poet? And, specifically, what are the poet's responsibilities?
Elder: Again, depending upon mood, I find myself answering these questions from different perspectives. The one which dominates when I’m not thinking out of a particular context, though, is that poetry is a psycho-biological phenomenon and, as an oral medium, was most certainly the first art form with profound—though rarely immediate—utility. Hearing it, reading it, and creating it are all exercise for development of the imagination. Now, so are other arts and endeavors. But there are none that are either as portable or as efficient as poetry because of its inherent characteristic that requires of the forebrain to make its own pictures in order to experience it, which partially explains poetry’s ubiquitousness among the species, especially with respect to education of the child and the necessity of passing the baton—cultural myths—from generation to generation. And what is education if not an attempt to equip persons with imagination and experience for the sake of the capacity to anticipate, to solve problems of survival on one hand and, on the other, to make a life worth living? That which has arrived to make us the dominant species on earth, imagination, the ability to see into the future and thereby avert threats to our existence, comes hand in hand with the curse of the knowledge of our own demise. As for the poet, his or her role in such a scheme is therefore adaptive, ranging from the voice of an angel to the canary in the mine. The poet’s responsibility is the will to sing.
Montag: Which poets do you admire these days, and which books do you find yourself returning to?
Elder: I’ve always been fearful of this question. I want to lend praise to all by whom I have been moved, including those whose work I seek with regularity, contributors to Seems, friends, and students, the number of which is maybe literally (no pun intended) in the thousands. I want not to offend by leaving persons out. Consequently, I’m choosing to speak only of the dead, even though I’ve already spilled the beans with respect to Strand, whose recent work I find as vital as ever. See, for instance, "My Name" in, I believe, an April, 2005, issue of The New Yorker. And I mentioned Bill Heyen previously, on whose work I imprinted as a fledgling poet and who continues to astound me with his sensibility, a magnanimousness observed simultaneously alongside his colossal capacity for empathy.
Secondly, I must confess that it’s not entire volumes to which I most often return but individual poems; I’m by nature a browser, reading from several books at once.
There’s Stevens, always Stevens, it seems of late. A second tier of frequency might be in this order: Merrill, Bishop, Sexton, Matthews, Frost, Takahashi (Stryk’s translations), Basho, Masters, and Poe. Of the half dozen of these who lived in my lifetime William Matthews is the only one I knew personally. Yet the admiration and friendship did not develop to the degree that it has with Heyen and Strand.
Montag: You won the 2005 Niedecker Award. How did that come about? What other awards or prizes have you won? What do awards or prizes mean to a poet?
Elder: How, in 1948, could Ted and Ann Elder have known that 25 miles up the road from where they lived on Emerson St. (four or five blocks from where Beloit Poetry Journal would be born two years later), an obscure though fabulous poet was at work or that their infant son would more than a half century later be honored with an award in her name?
Around three years ago, never having heard of Lorine Niedecker, I became curious about the poet from Wisconsin others were talking about with such devotion and that the Council for Wisconsin Writers had established the award. One afternoon I about choked on my Diet Coke, reading of her affair and her nearly life-long exchange of letters with Louis Zukofsky, the great Objectivist from New York City, whose aesthetic had so intrigued me in my mid-twenties. Reading more of her poems, I said to myself, "This looks like stuff I’ve been doing of late" (The Minimalist’s How-to Handbook), and I entered the competition, something I’ve rarely done. I’m told I sent five poems. One of them, by the way, "In a Town Called Unincorporated," you had published in your "Saturday’s Poem" feature. "Alpha Images," perhaps my most well-known poem, was in the batch as well. The other three were probably all from Mead.
Prizes. There have been a few, including a Pushcart and two appearances in The Best American Poetry series, and I’ve always felt terribly grateful for the encouragement, yet I sense that for many writers the validation that arrives with an award is less important to them than it is to their spouses in that the spouses then have to explain less why the bum mowed but half the lawn and is holed-away in the basement or study.
Prizes. Publication itself is a kind of prize, more encouragement, which some of us require in order to prime the engine.
Concluded at Part Four, below....
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