[Leslie Monsour]

Susan McLean grew up in Oxon Hill, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC, as the oldest of five children. Her father was a plasma physicist, and her mother had been a chemist before she became a full-time housewife and caregiver. Susan went to Harvard as an undergraduate and to Rutgers University-New Brunswick to get a Ph.D. in English literature. Since 1988, she has been an English professor at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, Minnesota. She resumed writing poetry in 1990, nineteen years after giving it up because of the negative reactions she received from professors for writing poetry in form. Her poems and translations of poetry from French and Latin have appeared in Hunger Mountain, Arion, Measure, Literary Imagination, The Lyric, Iambs & Trochees, The Classical Outlook, and elsewhere. In 2004 she won a McKnight Artist Fellowship/Loft Award in Poetry. In 2006, her poetry chapbook, Holding Patterns, was published by Finishing Line Press.


HOW DID POETRY FIGURE IN YOUR YOUTH? Did poetry have a presence in your home when you were growing up? What first awakened you to it? Any poets you memorized? Did you study music? What was school like for you? Who, if anyone, encouraged you?

My family home was full of books, a hundred or more, and I also was taken to the library regularly to fill up on more. I was introduced to all the usual suspects in poetry—Dr. Seuss, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Mother Goose—as well as a joke book for children that contained many funny rhyming poems. My grandmother knew a number of poems by heart, some didactic and some funny, and would recite them to entertain her grandchildren. I enjoyed poetry as soon as I encountered it. I think I wrote my first poem in second grade and continued to write poetry steadily up through high school, where I was the editor of the literary magazine for two years. A major discovery for me was my mother’s college English textbook, where I read for the first time the medieval ballads, Renaissance sonnets, and poems by Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, Tennyson, Kipling, and others that had a powerful appeal for me. I memorized poems easily, usually for fun and not because I was required to. I knew a large chunk of Longfellow’s poem about Paul Revere’s ride, some poems from The Lord of the Rings, “Ozymandias,” and lots of lines or stanzas from poems that just stuck with me, with no deliberate effort on my part.

For about three years I took piano lessons, but I never was very attracted to playing, though my mother is a talented pianist. I enjoyed singing more, and continued to do that in glee clubs, choirs, and madrigal groups right through college, as well as performing in a number of musical comedies in high school and college. I couldn’t wait to go to school when I was a child, because I was so eager to learn. Though I tended to idolize my good teachers, I also had some mediocre ones. Because I was eager to learn, I was generally encouraged by my teachers. However, I liked reading so much that I was often tempted to do it when I should be doing something else. Maybe I had a low tolerance for being bored, but the reading did get me in trouble with some teachers. My main problem in school was with other kids. I was not popular, and after my only friend moved away during third grade, I had a six-year stretch of having no friends at all, which was devastating. I withdrew into books more and more. I had one English teacher in tenth grade, Miss Juliano, who encouraged me in my ambition to be a writer, but she moved away after that year.


YOU HAVE INDICATED that from approximately 1971 to 1990, you wrote no poetry, having been discouraged as a formalist. Can you recall for us what specific sorts of negative responses to formal verse you experienced? What part, if any, did your writing instructors play in encouraging or discouraging you?

In my senior year in high school, I entered a statewide contest for teen writers. I was one of the winners, and the prize was to have a weekend of writing workshops with professors at the University of Maryland. I had one fiction workshop and one poetry workshop. In the latter, the professor was highly critical of my poems (all in rhyme and meter) and made it clear that that sort of writing was no longer acceptable. I tried to continue writing poetry after that, but suddenly it was hard. In my sophomore year at Harvard I was rejected from a poetry workshop I applied to take, so I gave up and just focused on studying literature, not writing it. My one exception was that when I was studying Latin, I did some of my translations of Catullus in form; in my senior year I entered a Harvard contest to translate an ode of Horace into formal verse, and I won it.


OF COURSE, IT WOULD BE FASCINATING TO KNOW what, in 1990, brought poetry flowing through your pen again. Was it a journal, a particular poet, an instructor, an anthology or book that restored your confidence? Tim Steele’s MISSING MEASURES came out roughly about that time. Did it have anything to do with your renewed faith in formal poetry?

In 1990, I finally finished my Ph.D. dissertation, after a many-year slog with a very unhelpful advisor. I felt a huge weight lifted from my life and finally felt free to do something just because I wanted to. In a conversation with Phil Dacey, my poet colleague who was also one of the editors of the ground-breaking anthology of formal verse Strong Measures, I mentioned that I used to write poetry. He said that if I wanted to show him any poems, he would give me feedback on them. Because he wrote formal verse himself, I felt that I could trust him not to be hostile just because I wrote in form. I started to write again, and his suggestions were both encouraging and helpful. Unfortunately, he did not mention any journals that specialized in form, and I was so isolated that I did not stumble across any of them until many years later. So when I first started to send my poems out to journals, I had very little success. Only the free-verse poems were accepted at first (I wrote both kinds of verse at the beginning).


IS IT A CHALLENGE OR A BREEZE to interest today’s literature students in contemporary formalism?

It is a challenge, partly because some of my creative-writing colleagues are dismissive of form and not reluctant to say so to students. When I taught an introduction to poetry class (reading, not writing), students complained that we were not covering enough free verse for their taste, so I added more. When I have tried to teach poetry writing in form, many students are unwilling to give it a try. Some try, but have enormous difficulty with hearing meter, no matter how much I explain it and how many exercises I give in how to do it. It is work, and unless you love formal verse, the extra challenge may not seem worth it. But each year I have a few students who not only catch on fast, but even seem to enjoy it. By bringing in lots of examples of contemporary formal poets, I think I at least am able to dispel the notion that you can’t say anything edgy or interesting in formal verse.


IS THERE ANYTHING YOU FIND particularly useful as a means to refresh your unique view of the world and your place in it, and, perhaps, trick yourself into making a poem? What truly inspires you today--creatively, spiritually, and emotionally? What genuinely turns you off?

For me, reading other poets is one of the best ways to get ideas for poems, but I get my inspiration anywhere I can: rock lyrics, news, personal experience, chance phrases that pop into my head. To write a poem, I usually need an idea and a line or phrase. One without the other will go into my notebook, but if I get both I can usually get a draft of a poem. My poems often deal with gender issues in some way. Although I have loved myth and literature from an early age, I have not always loved the way women are portrayed in both. I guess I have been a resisting reader for a long time, and my poems often reflect my own interpretation of someone else’s story.

Other writers have mentioned the role of depression in their lives. Though I have had periods of depression due to negative events in my life, I have not experienced clinical depression. On the other hand, rage has been a muse, of sorts. Rage, unlike depression, can inspire one to take action against mistreatment and misconceptions. By writing about a traumatic event, one can take control of it. I tend to feel better after doing so. Like humor, writing can be a form of displaced aggression; both can transmute pain and anger into something useful, even beneficial, to others.

I am both saddened and angry that so many free-verse writers still attack writing in form. I think the two approached can co-exist comfortably, and I can’t understand why others (on both sides) can’t live and let live.


WHAT DO YOU LOVE MOST about living in your part of the world? Least?

Marshall, Minnesota, a town of about 12,000 people, is the smallest town I have ever lived in. It is ninety miles from the nearest city. Though I like the friendliness, calm, and safety of the town and I enjoy teaching small classes instead of large lecture courses, I really miss the cultural opportunities of larger cities, which I can rarely drive to during the school year. The landscape is very flat here and the winters are cold and extremely long. I spend my summers in Iowa City, Iowa, a more cosmopolitan place, and I enjoy traveling or residing in Europe for a few weeks in the summer. I have lived for a month each in Dublin, Rome, and Cambridge (UK), and for three months in Edinburgh. I love getting to know different people and cultures; it is easier to see what is unique about America when one has experienced something different from it.


WHAT QUESTION do you wish I’d asked?

I have a lot of scientists in my family (both my parents, plus I have a sister who is a biochemist and a brother who is a neuroradiologist), so I have often wondered why words, not numbers, have always been important to me. I am curious about whether writing in meter (in numbers, as Pope would have said) appeals more to people who have an aptitude for numerical thinking. There is an orderliness to writing in form, but there is a wildness to it, too, in which one fights to keep the emotion inside the box.


FINALLY, THE ONLY QUESTION YOU ARE REQUIRED TO ANSWER: What are your thoughts about Tim Murphy’s claim that there is an “extraordinary efflorescence of terrific poetry by women going on, unprecedented in human history?”

Of course there is a spate of good poetry by women now, and of course the number of women poets is greater than ever before because women have never before had as much access to the education and publishing opportunities that make writing possible. That some women have managed to overcome enormous obstacles in the past in order to write excellent poetry is indisputable. With many more women writing, the chance that there will be more women who are terrific at it goes way up. Though it is impossible to know which of the women writing now will still be read in a hundred years, I am convinced that many women will be. Among the regulars here at Eratosphere there are quite a few who are as qualified to answer these questions as I am. I feel honored to read their work and to hear their reactions to mine.

I don’t think that an increase in the number of good female poets means a decrease in the number of good male poets. Men continue to have access to education and publishing opportunities. The number of male editors still far exceeds the number of female editors, though the latter is increasing. Women tend to read for pleasure more than men do, so it may be that they form a potential audience to support the growing number of female poets. I don’t think that women are particularly drawn to form. It seems that the number of women is increasing in every branch of poetry. I do wonder whether feeling like an outsider might be connected to writing in form. Since formal poetry is still considered peripheral to the mainstream, it may be that men and women who feel marginalized may identify with it. But, for me, I think it was first and foremost the beauty of form that drew me to it, helplessly, like falling in love.


A selection of poems by Susan McLean:


DEEP COVER

Nakedness is the best disguise.
When you discard the final veil,
it always takes them by surprise.

Because men think that compromise
is weak--that if you yield, you fail--
nakedness is the best disguise.

Though you expose your breasts and thighs,
your mind is as opaque as shale.
It always takes them by surprise

to find out that the body lies.
Surrender can conceal betrayal.
Nakedness is best. Disguise,

equivocation, alibis
can be seen through. To lay a trail
that always takes them by surprise,

hide nothing, and you'll blind their eyes.
Go ask Judith. Go ask Jael.
Nakedness is the best disguise.
It always takes them by surprise.


DESIRE

Desire casts out her net, and you forget
the way you thrashed and gasped in it before.
Though you're too old to want to play coquette,
desire casts out her net
of loss and longing that you can't ignore,
floated by lies and weighted with regret.

Your feet, you think, are firmly on the shore;
you're not a fool, to play Russian roulette
with all you care for, just to feel once more
that mad, electric vertigo. And yet
desire casts out her net.


FAT SALLY’S LOVE SONG

A skinny girl's got ice cubes in her soul.
She'll give you half and never give you whole.
But when I eat ice cream, I lick the bowl.

A skinny girl's too needy to stay true.
Her bony hips will poke you black and blue.
Come find out what my featherbed will do.

A skinny girl may look good by your side.
She may buff up the finish on your pride.
But call me when you need to thumb a ride.

A skinny girl will marry you for money
and never laugh at jokes you know are funny.
But you can share my biscuits; pass the honey.

A skinny girl's got black holes in her eyes.
She won't be happy till the day she dies.
If you want loving, try me on for size.

EMILIA TO DESDEMONA

You say you love him. What else can you say
after you've earned your father's curse and fled
to Cyprus? Truth won't keep despair away.
Lie in it if you will, you've made your bed.
You're under marital—and martial—law
now that you've dogged your husband to the wars,
so shut your eyes and ears to every flaw,
for women here are either wives or whores.

You say he loves you. Why then did he rage
at you as if you'd given him the clap?
Men court a goddess and then kick a wife.
Do any foolish thing he asks; assuage
his wrath. It never ends with just a slap.
Next time he'll use his fist. Later, a knife.


CASSANDRA

Because I turned him down, the god Apollo
cursed me with sight. The gift of art is not
the kind you can refuse. No matter what
you do or fail to do, the scenes will follow
you everywhere, assault you in your dreams.
Even if you could turn yourself to wood,
he’d force your hardened fingertips to bud,
and make a garland of your silent screams.
You don’t believe me? Though I’ve heard you sneer
and call me crazy, still you’d have me offer
forecasts of the future. Apropos
of your young daughter, would you like to hear
what day she’ll die and everything she’ll suffer?
I thought not. No one really wants to know.


DOORS

Death is a fickle lover. He was curt
when I came knocking on my father's grave--
not even a small crack opened in the dirt.
I rattled the locks on every door: the cave
of the crawl space under the house; the jar of pills
gleaming in darkness, like a pile of skulls;
the scarlet door of the razor in my skin;
the cold blue door of the water in the bay.
Galloping through furrowed fields, I'd pray
the lips of earth would open and let me in.
But the pills would not stay down; the gashes healed;
the water bore me up, as water does.
Weary at finding every exit sealed,
I opened the oven door, and there he was.


DELILAH

What did he think? That when he swaggered in
after the slaughter, sweaty, rank, and scarlet,
I'd welcome him--the man who'd killed my kin--
with kisses, just another heathen harlot?

I did, of course. One must be wary of
the foaming boar that's crashed into one's room.
I knelt and offered him my abject love,
cast off my robe, dabbed on my myrrh perfume.

His god gave him brute force, muscles of bronze,
a secret, and no sense. Mine gave me rare
green eyes, red lips, breasts whiter than a swan's--
and brains. Besides, I merely cut his hair.

I have my loyalties, as he has his.
Go ask your Judith what the difference is.


ASYLUM

It's quiet now in St.-Paul-de-Mausole,
where tourists come to visit Van Gogh's room
and wonder why its peace could not console
his anguished mind. Here irises still bloom;
the hills roll on like waves; the olive trees
shimmer and ripple in the midday sun;
and cypresses point skyward, silent pleas,
like God's own finger or a loaded gun.

But on a dim church wall in that retreat
a scorpion poises, hiding in plain sight,
as still as cast bronze, elegant, infernal--
another refugee. The late-spring heat
made it seek sanctuary from the light,
for scorpions--like nightmares--are nocturnal.


TRANSLATIONS OF EPIGRAMS BY MARTIAL

1.102
I’d say the painter of your Venus tried

to show he’s really on Minerva’s side.

Qui pinxit Venerem tuam, Lycori,

blanditus, puto, pictor est Minervae.

2.21
Some get your kiss: some, a handshake. You demand

“Which would you like? You choose.” I’ll take the hand.

Basia das aliis, aliis das, Postume, dextram.

dicis ‘utrum mavis? elige.’ malo manum.

11.44
You’re childless, rich, and old as the Republic.

Do you suppose your friendships are all true?

Some are — from back when you were young and poor.

Your new friends would be glad to bury you.

Orbus es et locuples et Bruto consule natus:

esse tibi veras credis amicitias?

sunt verae, sed quas iuvenis, quas pauper habebas.

qui novus est, mortem diligit ille tuam.

12.73
You tell me I’m your heir, Catullus. Still,

I won’t believe it till I read the will.

Heredem tibi me, Catulle, dicis.

non credo nisi legero, Catulle.

12.91
Magulla, you share your husband’s bed

and the boy he sleeps with. Why not, too,

the boy who pours his wine? You sigh.

Aha! You fear he’ll poison you.

Communis tibi cum viro, Magulla,

cum sit lectulus et sit exoletus,
quare, dic mihi, non sit et minister.

suspiras; ratio est, times lagonam.

[Tim Murphy]

Another cracking good interview. Susan, I assume you're sending round a first book manuscript. What percentage of it is sonnets? When you first started posting, I think it was only translations from Martial, which of course are brilliant. It was only after these were enthusiastically received, that we learned how fine an original poet you are. Isn't this a repeat of the strategy you outlined above? Effective strategy, I must say. Finally, doesn't your spouse teach at Iowa City? Alan is in Fort Lauderdale and I in Fargo because of Grim Exigency. What are your thoughts about spouses pursuing their careers at a distance. (By ND standards, Marshall to I.C. ain't far.)

[Susan McLean]

Tim, I have been sending out book manuscripts to contests for about nine years, so far without success, though I did eventually get a chapbook accepted. My manuscript is now about 1/4 sonnets; that is a far higher percentage than in the past. For years after I started writing, sonnets were rare among my poems, but now I would say that they have displaced villanelles as my most common form. I didn't resume translating poetry until 2000; when I first started posting on Eratosphere, I posted only original poems. Eventually I posted a couple of Catullus translations to a discussion of bawdy poetry (though not for critique because we did not have a translation forum then) and you put together an e-chapbook of my Catullus translations for The New Formalist, though that was removed from the web site about a year later by Leo Yankevich. I started translating Martial around the end of 2002.

John Finamore and I aren't married, but we have been together since 1967. Because he is a classicist at the University of Iowa, we spend most of the academic year 400 miles apart, getting together every third weekend and during vacations. Neither of us would have chosen this separation, which does not get easy over time, but it was necessary if we both were to have the jobs we had trained for. The only good thing I can say about the separation is that it prevents us from taking one another for granted. People tend to assume that classics brought us together, but actually we had been together for years before I started to study Latin. He was studying ancient philosophy in grad school and decided he needed to learn the languages, so he took a course in ancient Greek while teaching himself Latin from my college textbook.

Susan

[A. E. Stallings]

I get tired sometimes of the villanelle as a form--you can often see exactly how the whole thing will predictably unfold from the first three lines, but Deep Cover is just terrific. I love how it ups the ante in the antepenultimate line with that great "Go ask Judith. Go ask Jael." Wow.

I'm intrigued with the idea of a period of silence--involuntary or voluntary--something that has come up in Suzanne Doyle's and Catherine's interviews as well. I would be interested in a general discussion of this if Leslie were willing to open a thread for it--I don't want it to overwhelm Susan's here. It occurs to me that many of the poets I most admire wrote with difficulty and/or published sparingly. I wonder if there is more pressure nowadays just to keep churning poems out and to publish way too much. That would seem to have something to do with the professionalization of poetry as well...

I was also curious whether you felt there was some link with your writing in/ understand of form and your study of classics. I was partly attracted to the classics department over the English department because of an emphasis on the rather old-fashioned art of close reading, and on meter and rhetorical devices, which seemed more of a nuts-and-bolts poetry education than the more theoretical environment of the English department.

Enjoyed these poems and the interview...

(edited back to correct my quotation... I wasn't misquoting, i think the k on my computer was sticking! apologies...)

[This message has been edited by A. E. Stallings (edited November 29, 2008).]

[Julie Kane]

Susan, I enjoyed learning more about you and reading the selection of poems. I am going to pass "Fat Sally's Love Song" on to two of my colleagues who teach a collaborative course on food in literature--I know they will be delighted with it. And I am curious about the poem "Doors"--were you consciously writing in the specific persona of Plath (the father fixation, the crawl space, the oven door, the near-drowning, the galloping horse = Ariel, etc.), or was it meant to be a more generic voice?

[Susan McLean]

Thanks for the responses, Alicia and Julie.

Alicia, the line you cited from "Deep Cover" actually reads
"Go ask Judith. Go ask Jael." But the way you read it works just as well in the context, and I'm sorry I hadn't thought of that option. I suspect that a period of silence only looks silent from the outside. The internal reactions continue, and the experiences that go into the poems are being processed, consciously or not. I think some people can be too prolific for their own good, if their self-worth is based on productivity alone. For those whose poems seem to be wrung out only under pressure or else polished to a high sheen by continual revision, the power of the results may compensate for their rarity.

I did not stick with Latin long enough to get a really solid grounding in its prosody. When I studied English at Harvard, theory was barely touched on and close reading/study of historical contexts seemed to be the preferred approach. I did not receive any extensive education in meter or rhetorical devices, but I think I picked up a good bit just from reading extensively in English literature of the early periods.

Julie, yes, I was speaking in the persona of Plath in "Doors," and I thought that would be obvious to readers, but I overestimated the public's familiarity with the details of her life; I have had several people assume that I wrote the poem from personal experience. I rather like the puzzle form the poem has, where the accumulation of details is meant to allow the reader to guess the speaker's identity. But it backfires, to some extent, if they guess wrong. So far I have resisted adding a dedication, "for Sylvia Plath," as an epigraph.

Susan

[Rose Kelleher]

Susan, I enjoyed your chapbook and look forward to a full-length collection from you. The poems posted above are very fine, but in your chapbook are some autobiographical (or autobiographical-sounding) poems, and those are the ones I associate most with you: The Shark at the Aquarium, The Cape, World Book and others. Those are the ones that moved me with their honesty (or seeming honesty) and made me feel like I knew you. That got me thinking about some of the earliest and most vehement advice I got from "experts" on the Internet: don't write autobiographical poetry, nobody's interested in your life or your problems, don't use the word "I," blah blah blah. What's up with that? I agree with Judith Barrington, who wrote, "Your 'I' can become the universal 'we' if you dig deep, deeper than is comfortable, for the kernel of truth in your subject." (That's from this essay - thanks, Mary) Anyway, this is a vague "question," sorry, but I'd be interested in your thoughts on autobiographical poetry, use of the first person, honesty, fear, and anything else you want to talk about.

[Susan McLean]

Rose,
I'm glad you enjoyed the poems in the chapbook, which were basically all autobiographical. After nearly twenty years of poetic silence, I had a lot of baggage I needed to deal with. In some ways those poems are very raw because many of them were written early, before I had learned some of the finer points of meter, etc., but I think they are all poems and not rants or mere descriptions of what happened. Some of them were hard to write, either for fear of hurting someone I know or for fear of exposing my own weaknesses and vulnerabilities. But I have long felt that truth is where the power lies, so I try not to change any details of the experience, but to try to capture how it felt through metaphors that others can relate to.

So much of what makes us who we are comes through feelings and experiences we don't tell to anyone. I tend to assume that there is a lot of overlap in those unmentionables, and that if I can talk frankly about mine, others will see some similarities to theirs. I admire other writers who have done this--Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton--and I would like to have some of their courage. It does take courage, though, because it is very easy to sneer at people who break those taboos, and it is fashionable in some circles to make fun of anyone who deals with "confessional" material. If you worry too much about what other people think, though, you never write anything.

My persona poems are often autobiographical in a different way, in a way known only to me. When I want to go beyond "just the facts" and deal with emotional extremes, that is one way I do it. We all can feel some powerful emotions that we would not act on. To delve into them in poems reveals a different kind of truth. I loved to act in plays when I was younger; the chance to be someone else for a while is very freeing.

I value both the right to talk about my own experiences and the right to make things up, but I prefer to keep it clear which is which. It is tempting to make one's own life more sensational, but I think people who do that can lose the trust of readers if the readers feel they are being lied to. I want to play fair, not be some poetic con woman.

Susan

[FOsen]

Susan, I'm glad you're being recognized in this forum; I wanted to cite one of your more recent poems, but I’m hoping it’s submitted/accepted somewhere good right now.

Frank

I like this one from your chapbook:

Indians

When I was five, I wanted to be an Indian
when I grew up. I didn’t covet the feathers
and beads, the tepees, pemmican, or braids,
I wanted to be silent and resourceful,
to make with my own hands everything I needed,
to speak in a language cowboys never bothered
to learn, to be misunderstood when I tried to use
their broken words, to talk wityh my hands and eyes,
to be unimpressed weith the Great White Father,
to own only what I could carry with me,
to leave no visible mark as I passed through.
I am a woman. It has all come true.

[Janet Kenny]

Susan,
I love the independent feminist and sly humanist in your poems. Your feminism is very feminine and the irony is always first rate. I love "Delilah".
There is something very accessible about your poems no matter what the topic.
Wise and quietly funny with sometimes just a touch of waspishness.

I was interested to read what you said about rage. I have only written one rage poem and it was more successful than others I had written at that time. Rage drove many political activities in my life but only once did it give energy to a poem.

I am very lucky to have met you on this forum. Thanks for your generous participation.
Janet