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Alex: You must be an art collector, you have so many
sonnets built on art work. Are you a collector?
Beth: One of my friends used to call my flat Gertrude and Alice’s
because there was so much art work all over the place. I have lots of
pictures and pottery and lots of — stuff. I used to paint, and make
stained glass, though I’ve sold or given away all of that. I’m into
decorating and even having a jungle on my patio when I have one. It’s
just that creative impulse, I have to create a work of art everywhere,
out of everything, even if it means refinishing junk.
Alex: I know the sonnet sequence builds on art work. Is that
something you were always planning to do, or did something just happen
and ...you just sat down and started writing it?
Beth: Kind of both. I wrote a poem that was in the Literary
Review — not in the chapbook but in one of their journals — on a
painting by Artemesia Gentileschi, and that poem was a text within a
text within a text, there was my poem and her painting and the whole
tradition of paintings on the Judith theme, and that story came from an
old text that’s part of the Apocaphra that’s part of some Catholic
Bibles but not the Protestant version, and then there are other subtexts
embedded and references that you would only understand if you had
knowledge of Artemesia’s life, knowledge I got from Mary Girard’s
wonderful book — another text — such as the transcript of the rape
trial — Artemesia had been raped at fourteen by the artist Tossi, and
she was the one subjected to torture, I think it was thumbscrews, to
prove her innocence — and the way women artists have always been
erased from the canon — like Artemesia, who was the Baroque portrait
painter, the highest paid painter ever up to that time, but after her
lifetime she was literally deleted from history, until Girard excavated
her —, and so on. I just loved the whole process of writing that poem,
and of honoring the life of this amazing artist, and I thought then that
I really wanted to write more about art, but I hadn’t. And one day,
just when I had decided to write the formal poems, I saw a picture of a
painting and I thought, I’m going to write a sonnet about that, and I
went home and I got out an art history tome and I started leafing
through instead of checking the index because I knew more or less where
it was, and I kept seeing other works and thinking, wow, I’m going to
write one on that, too, and that, and that — my mind just exploded,
and I sat down and started writing sonnets and I just kept going, I
couldn’t stop, I wrote all day, sometimes 3 in a day, plus I tried a
few villanelles, some of which you have, and it was such a high. And
then I thought, ok, my new job starts Monday, I must stop, and I did,
and that was the end of that rush. I could have kept going, I wish I’d
had more time. I felt like I was really just getting the hang of it,
like I was very comfortable and I was ready to try to take it to a
higher level. That job was a temporary job, and then I had a month a
while later, and that’s when I wrote the first draft of the nonfiction
book. Have you written anything from art?
Alex: No, but seeing your example, I’m inspired. There was a
picture that my father hung in the family room in our house when I was
small, a picture of Adam and Eve expelled from the garden of Eden. Their
shame was clear even at that age. I always had that picture in my mind
— it’s an image I grew up with. I’ve since found out it is a
Masaccio painting. That’s where I will start.
Beth: I think it’s a good place to start: the beginning, genesis.
Alex: When you’re writing formal poems, do you generally stick to
form, or do you sometimes experiment?
Beth: I really like formal poems to be what they were designed to
be. I have a problem with people who write an 18 line poem that’s not
in any type of meter and has no rhyme, and they call it a sonnet; why? I
can see writing against the tradition, but it’s already been done;
once it’s been done, it’s not new and clever any more, why do that?
Why not just create a whole new form? I stick very closely to form,
except that I was writing so many sonnets that the iambic pentameter
started to make me feel like I would run screaming from the building at
some point, and I was even having weird dreams with a voice-over in
iambic pentameter, so I thought, lest I become a menace to society I
should start playing around with the meter a little bit, and then I was
doing it alot just to see what the effect would be, but I still kept the
10 syllables per line and a definite rhyme scheme. And then I started
playing around with rhyme schemes a little bit, there’s a tradition of
that and I like that. And I can think of one sonnet, "Gingko," in
which I added an extra syllable in each of the two lines of the couplet,
I thought it added to the humor.
Alex: Yes, it does.
Beth: But I like sticking as closely to the form as possible most of
the time. I think some poets want to write in strict form but can’t,
so they say they didn’t want to in the first place. Occasionally I see
a sonnet that’s not and yet it is, somehow it works, like Kay Ryan’s
"Sonnet To Spring" in her book Elephant Rocks. But usually I
think nonsonnets are just failed attempts by wannabe sonneteers. I guess
I’m a snob. And sometimes people assume the form is something that it’s
not. I often have students who think that villanelles should be in
iambic pentameter, but that’s not one of the stipulations of a
villanelle, although many people have written them that way. I would
actually like to write some villanelles in iambic pentameter, but I
haven’t done that.
Alex: I noticed that your villanelles weren’t in iambic
pentameter.
Beth: I purposely didn’t want them to be, because I thought with
all those sonnets, if I had a book of formal poems, which is what I want
to write, it would be overkill, it would be iambic pentameter Chinese
water torture. But I do want to try them eventually, because I think
there’s that added level of formality. If I have a subject matter that
I think is really an elevated content and I want it to be in the most
elevated form possible, then I would do it in iambic pentameter. Like
Dylan Thomas’s "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" —
it would lose something if the meter were a little less regular.
Alex: Yes, it’s very strict.
Beth: It’s a very intense poem. If I had something that intense I
would probably want to put it into iambic pentameter. I don’t know why
that’s so much more formal, it just is.
Alex: What about your sestina, the one you mentioned earlier?
Beth: The sestina I wrote for the Literary Review chapbook.
Again I wanted to stay away from the iambic pentameter, then because I
felt like I needed the voice to be able to intensify through the varying
line lengths. A sestina is a very different form than a sonnet. And
unlike the sonnets, which are basically musings, and more controlled,
that sestina is really in the voice of someone standing right there,
going through the motions of the ritual. That voice requires a different
rhythm.
Alex: When you stay away from iambic pentameter, is there some kind
of formula you choose for the meter of the line, or is it just pretty
much random?
Beth: It’s ordered chaos. I usually don’t give myself any
specification, it’s just what sounds right, what feels right. I read
it out loud in my head and sometimes I actually read it out loud, and it
has a certain weight to it that feels right, and that’s pretty much
how I determine how long the line is going to be, how many beats it has
or what rhythm or meter it has. It’s like improvising jazz or blues.
The poem in 13 Moon, though — "Grandmother’s Garage" —
I created my own very regular form. I want to do more of that, too. It’s
really fun.
Alex: Are there any poets who have influenced you?
Beth: Billions and billions. I‘d have to go all the way back to
the beginning. All the greats that one reads as a lit major. I loved
literature as a kid, even more so as an adult. I guess junior high was
when we first started reading poetry in class and talking about it, and
I just loved it, I was a natural, as most poets tend to have been. It
was amazing how instantly I just fell in love with poetry and how good I
was at knowing what a poem was about when most of the other kids were
clueless — you formed this strange, unspoken bond with the other kids
that also got it — it felt very natural. I loved Robert Frost very
early, and Shakespeare, all the greats. When I was a lit major I loved
everybody, Dante, Milton, Chaucer, Donne, the metaphysical poets,
Herbert, Marvell — even Beowulf. We didn’t really have a class that
studied contemporary poetry for some reason. I think it was just too
radical for the University of Evansville — back then Evansville was
called "the buckle on the Bible belt" — although there were
classes on earlier modern poetry, Eliot, Yeats, the usual fare. But even
of the early modernists, Stein and Woolf were taboo — back then it was
a very conservative school, and homophobic, not that all the profs were
conservative. Later, when I got out of school, I started really reading
contemporary poetry. I lived in a suburb of Cincinnati for awhile, and I
got to know the librarian because I was the only person that ever
checked out the literary journals. She let me check out all of them at
once, and lots of books — a huge stack — and bring them back
whenever I wanted and no one knew but us. During that period I was just
saturating my brain cells with the latest poetry. A few years later I
was living in L.A. the year Mary Oliver got the Pulitzer for American
Primitive. I went out and bought a copy, and I thought, I love this
— I can do this — you know that cockiness is so important to budding
poets! Obviously she’s awesome. I was captivated.
Alex: Yes, I love her alot.
Beth: You can’t not. Even if you pooh pooh the "simple"
style, you have to admit, the woman is an awesome poet. And that’s
when I started writing poetry. I’d written a little as an undergrad,
but back then creative writing classes were rare almost everywhere, and
programs were unheard of, except for Iowa, and I’d never even heard of
that. In terms of formalism, I’d say influences have been May Sarton,
Elizabeth Bishop, Galway Kinnell, Marilyn Hacker — in fact I’d have
to say that Marilyn Hacker was really the first one that got me excited
about the contemporary possibilities of the older forms, because she was
doing such radical content in her formal poems. I loved her gutsiness,
and I hadn’t really come into contact with alot of gutsiness yet.
There was a certain kind of radicalness out there, like Ginsberg and the
other beat poets, but she was different. In fact part of the impact of
the gutsiness was the very fact that she was using traditional forms.
Everyone else was throwing out the baby with the bath water, but she was
infiltrating, she was taking control and using old forms for her own
immediate purposes. It was so exciting to me — truly subversive, as
great literature through the ages has tended to be. And that was really
one of the main reasons I decided to do such a close study of the sonnet
form, although I always loved sonnets, but I thought wow, this I’ve
got to check into more.
Alex: When you were small, did you want to be a writer? When did you
first know you’d be a writer?
Beth: I think I always knew I’d be a writer. I remember as a kid,
when they’d ask, what do you want to be when you grow up, I’d say, a
writer, a lawyer, a writer, a geologist, a writer, an archaeologist —
I was always changing my mind, as kids do...
Alex: But the writer was always there.
Beth: Always. When I was a freshman in high school we had to give a
talk about what we wanted to be when we grew up, and I was the only one
that said writer, and my freshmen English teacher was absolutely
ecstatic that there was somebody from my hometown who actually wanted to
be a writer. I changed my mind at the last minute, and the day of the
official talk said astronaut, and she was downright angry. I used to
read a great deal as a kid and daydream and create stories in my head,
and I really wanted to write them out, but I didn’t start doing the
writing until later. Although I did keep an elaborate journal starting
in junior high, I think. What about you? When did you know?
Alex: When I was in elementary school I always loved to write. I was
very good in science, so I could have gone either way, but no matter
what I always loved reading and studying literature, Shakespeare, all
that. I went to French school to begin with, so I was reading Molière,
Victor Hugo... I went into engineering, got graduate degrees in
engineering. So, I was into writing tech manuals. But, every so often at
work, I’d write an email and get one back that said, you know, you
should be a writer.
Beth: Well you definitely are a writer!
Alex: Thank you. I know you teach at the University of California
Extensions at Berkeley and Santa Cruz, among other schools, so you’re
involved with doing writing exercises in class. Do they give you any new
ideas for poems? Do you get any new poems from the exercises?
Beth: I wish I could say I do. I’m really, really focused on
giving things to the students. I know some teachers write during the
time the students are writing — I can’t do that. First of all, I
have no sense of time. I tried it once, and I was constantly glancing at
my watch. Even if I’m not really watching my students, I am, I’m
somehow focused on how they’re taking the exercise — I guess I’m
the mother hen type, I’m too focused on them, and I can’t really
just relax and just write something in class.
Alex: Do you ever get ideas from your students that you develop into
your own poems?
Beth: I always say I’m going to steal things from the students,
but then I forget what I said I was going to steal. Again, I’m totally
focused on teaching rather than writing. I’m not really a writer when
I’m teaching, I mean I am, I’m teaching writing, but it’s all for
the other person, it’s a different way of relating to writing and
literature.
Alex: It’s also part of what you said earlier, when you start a
poem you want to finish it right there, so you start one in class and
you don’t finish it so...that’s not your style.
Beth: Not my style at all.
Alex: What other writing projects are you involved in? I know you
told me a moment ago that you just finished writing a book, the
nonfiction book.
Beth: Right now I’m writing a book on long term lesbian
relationships. I’m interviewing women in the Bay Area who have been in
them to see what it is that works, or that doesn’t work, and it’s
very interesting. It’s alot of work, transcribing all the tapes. It’s
very tedious, yet enjoyable, because everything I’m transcribing is so
interesting, the women are so wise and witty and articulate. And I’m
very much ready for another surge of poetry.
Alex: Hopefully you will be able to arrange things so you will have
another block of time to write.
Beth: That’s always my goal.
Alex: Well, thank you for being the featured poet for the première
issue of Able Muse.
Beth: My privilege. Truly.
Alex: We are honored to have you here with 37, count them, 37 poems.
That’s beyond the chapbook range, so it’s an electronic book, and
that is dynamite because this is to my knowledge, the first e-book of
formal poetry on the web.
Beth: May there be many, many more.
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