Renée Ashley. Poet and Teacher.
Renee Ashley
Renée Ashley is the author of four volumes of poetry (Salt --Brittingham Prize in Poetry, University of Wisconsin Press; The Various Reasons of Light; The Revisionist’s Dream; and Basic Heart -- X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, Texas Review Press) as well as two chapbooks (The Museum of Lost Wings and The Verbs of Desiring) and a novel (Someplace Like This). A portion of her poem, “First Book of the Moon,” is etched in marble in Penn Station Terminal in Manhattan, part of a permanent installation by artist Larry Kirkland.
The IthacaLit Interview with Renee Ashley
ML: I'm thrilled to speak with my former mentor at Fairleigh Dickinson, the poet, Renee Ashley. As my mentor throughout the MFA program at FDU, I looked to you for balance and found it. That was an invaluable gift.
RA: I’m so glad you found it… I’m betting, though, you conjured it yourself!
ML: What do you tell your students as they flounder with the spectrum of hyper expository narrative to cryptic, insular writing?
RA: I don’t have a pat answer, alas. I am a firm believer that, in poems, clarity is overrated; however, the reader must be able to find some place to stand, some footing in the poem, in order to want to remain there and receive the bulk of what is offered. If a poem doesn’t let me in, I’m probably going to harp on image, image alignment, and the quantum leap of resultant synergies that allows the reader to make a complicit whole that accounts for more than just the parts of the poem. I guess that’s the quick answer. As for those poems in the hyper-expository mode, I usually ask: Does this poem mean anything it doesn’t say? If it doesn’t mean more than the facts (or claims or stories), then it might as well be prose. A manual for your refrigerator. I’ve been known to ask: Why should I care? How does this poem earn the space, the poetic real estate, it takes up? If the answer is “Aren’t you interested in my life?” my answer is likely to be No. The poem needs to get bigger than its author and its material; if it doesn’t, it’s just anecdote. It needs to have matter, its unarticulated subject.
I often explain the difference between the logic of prose and the logic of poetry as the difference between a wet stone wall (a mortared wall) and a dry stone wall (stones stably arranged with no mortar) and I tell those who are mired in filling in all the gaps: Let’s get rid of the mortar. (Your reader is being suffocated! Poem of Amantillado!) Let the images speak. Give the poor things some air. It’s perfectly possible—and highly desirable—to leave some gaps in the logic, to make leaps that the reader can participate in rather than being locked in and bludgeoned with nonessential information or needless rhetoric. Every detail of the progression needn’t be accounted for. You really need to let the chipmunks dash through the cracks.
A poem, you could say, is like a bell: if you stuff a bunch of dirty laundry into the bell or make that bell too fixed, it can’t resonate. It thuds. Plud-plud. But if the bell is hung with the ability to move and room to swing, with air circulating freely in and about the body, it’s able to do its job, to vibrate after the clapper’s contact. It can resonate. Resonance, in the poetic sense, includes the reader in the process of experiencing the poem’s matter and consequence. Poetic logic likes air; it loves image and suggestion; it leans into negative capability; and it wants to include the reader in the work of the poem. Broad strokes, I’m afraid, but perhaps enough to answer your question?
ML: What do you learn with each new group of writers?
RA: That some things don’t change. That students who do not read widely and voraciously are given to the same sorts of beginners’ weaknesses and misapprehensions as the students with the same lack of hungers who came before them; that that sort of naïveté and/or laziness spawns some sort of common and erroneous idea of what a poem is. And that particular idea is usually based on ego rather than art. They need to love writing in both its noun- and verb-senses, and writing that is not their own. I learn, too, that I’m still capable of being surprised. Which is a godsend. And I learn stuff! My own life is small and, at this point, pretty cloistered. I learn about younger lives, which are inevitably different, either slightly or wholly, from my own and from the lives of students that came to me before them. A handful have taught me how to read poets I wasn’t wild about before, showed me what to admire, what lens to look through. Their entire sets of reference are different; it’s almost as though you could say their context is different. Their music, their social cues, their awarenesses and their obliviousnesses. It’s a Sisyphean job to keep up with all there is to learn from each class. I fail, of course.
ML: Can you tell readers about learning to write in your early years?
RA: I’m not sure I did learn to write when I was young. I just wrote. Poems, as a child and young adult. Some essays and fiction in my twenties. And school papers, of course. I was often given a great bit of creative leeway with those, even throughout grad school. I read incessantly (no siblings, an absent father, a mother who worked, often, two or three jobs and tended not to trust babysitters, and me unable to make friends easily or often). I didn’t really start looking into the craft of writing until I was, maybe, thirty. A real late bloomer. I was too shy to take creative writing classes in college—they wouldn’t let me audit and just listen; if I were going to be in the class I had to be in the class and workshop my pieces like everyone else. So that was a no-go. I would have died on the spot. I wouldn’t even have waited for the criticism. I’d’ve just keeled over and died.
ML: Perhaps tell us a little about the learning curve you experienced with your first novel and now the second novel; tell us if & how those books informed your poetry?
RA: What you might call a learning curve was more like a learning crash. I wrote my first novel, Someplace Like This, in my now-husband’s furnace room. It took me four years. I had had interest in my stories and essays but agents and editors kept telling me I had to have a novel, so I decided to write one. What the hell, right? What I didn’t understand about myself at that point was that I have no facility for plot whatsoever. Not one little soupçon of knack. After all, I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid confrontation, so the idea of a protagonist and an antagonist going at it was out of the question—and if the protagonist just walks away from the antagonist, you’ve got no story. But I hadn’t articulated that to myself when I began. I just sat down and started writing. When I was about one-third of the way through I drew up a table of contents, just naming my chapters by the plot point they covered. And so I wrote the whole book with just that. The really funny thing was that, at some point after completing the manuscript, I realized there was not one simile or metaphor in the entire novel. I had to go back and put them in. It sounds so bogus! but it’s how I learned to incorporate. They came naturally to me, but, evidently, not while under the strain of Writing-My-First-Novel—I think because the “what happened” was so all-consuming for my plot-challenged mind that I had no mind left to call up trope. I’m still plot-meager. My conflicts are internal. The novels I write are lyric novels. And I like to read lyric novels, so, except making-a-living-wise, that works out neatly. My second novel is with my agent as we speak. It’s about an artist who, during World War II, was incarcerated in one of the Japanese-American internment camps. Such a nasty business. I did a tremendous amount of research, most of which did not show up in the book at all except, perhaps, in ambient ways. And with each novel I complete, I say to my husband and friends, Just shoot me if I decide to write another one. OK? Please, just kill me. And, of course, there’s a nascent one in my upstairs office, but I have to admit it’s getting pretty dusty.
As for my novels informing my poems? If they have, I don’t see it. But trying to make good poems has informed the prose tremendously. Compression, syntaxes, silences, oh yeah.
ML: In a number of your poems, from different books, different times and themes, I've noted blue, black, bucket & fist used to describe the heart. It's never hearts & candy canes with reference to your heart images (I admire that) and the heart as it speaks of more than romantic love. Can you tell me what you're finding out when you speak of the heart?
RA: Ha! Could you ever mistake me for a hearts-and-candy girl? I’ve certainly got my soft spots, but I’m not a girly-girl. And if I’m sentimental, I try to keep it to myself. But the heart? Good grief … Whose is whole? Whose isn’t black and blue and rattling loose in its socket? I think I began using heart because somewhere along the line it was made clear to me that I shouldn’t use it. It was overdone. It was weak and sentimental. Trite. And so, I tried to figure out how to do it and make it work. I’d finished the manuscript of Basic Heart before Stephen Dobyns’s book, Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides, was published. The character that is Dobyns’s book is named Heart. The thinking and writing in that is pretty masterly. And hilarious. My first impulse, though, when I read it was to shout something really obscene, set my manuscript on fire, and drag out my mourning rags, but that lasted all of, maybe, two minutes. I’d written the book, I was sending it out. It wasn’t anything like Pallbearers. I was sticking by it. Coincidence or zeitgeist, the concurrent hearts? I have no idea. Pallbearers is a fabulous book. I love it. But mine’s a different take altogether. I once had a person at a reading—and this was decades before Basic Heart--say to me, “You aren’t what one could call a big fan of love, are you.” It wasn’t a question. I was really taken aback at the time, but also knew he’d heard something I hadn’t heard myself. It’s true: I have my doubts about love.
ML: In Salt there are a number of poems about your hometown. It can easily be read as autobiography, yet I know you dislike poetry about merely the self and one's personal experience. What did you discover using the imagery from the salt hills of home?
RA: Well, first of all, when I was writing Salt, I was just really learning, via reading and practice, what a poem was—and seemingly-autobiographical narrative was filling the literary journals in those days. I’ve learned a lot about the natures of poems and poetic ground since, but back then that’s what I knew. So that’s what I wrote. I used salt because it’s so basic—and it was so utterly there--and, too, because it’s used to preserve and so much that I was addressing was memory. The salt mounds as image served as a unifying focus for the book as a whole, or were meant to. Life was spinning around, differently from others, and yet everyone could see the same, stable thing. Like a string of pearls: the salt being the string that held the stories/pearls together. I was trying to capture a place and a time, but I knew it had to be bigger than that, it had to mean more than this, this, and this existed and such and such happened. I’m not anti-personal poem at all. Much of my later work is so personal that it has to be wrung into a different language to be meaningful to anyone but me. It’s not actions and reactions that are the real issue, but the interior climate and landscapes, the cold fronts and Westerly winds, the landslides and sinkholes, that will matter in the end.
ML: Another consistent image is dogs; dogs seem representative of simple being in an almost Buddhist sense. Watching your dogs, do you find a still point in their behavior and how does that propel your poems? What have your close friends, the many dogs in your life, taught you?
RA: A well-treated dog is happiness in a fur suit—who wouldn’t want to be part of that every day?—but of course you must have at least two because no one should be the only one of a species in the house. I don’t really think about dogs and writing… they’re just so much a part of my life that when I’m in something-like-my-exterior-life mode of thinking, they’re there. They’re always there. Getting hair on my furniture, drooling on my feet, tracking mud into the house, making nests in my sheets, sitting—quite literally—on my chest. Pound dogs, lost dogs, found dogs! Steven is trying to get on my lap as I’m typing this. He’s about five now, weighs seventy pounds, and has fur no longer than eyelashes. A friend gave me a DNA kit for him: evidently he’s Boxer and Irish Setter. But he’s sleeker than a seal. Pooty—my girl, she’s about fifteen now—usually sits near me, but she doesn’t want to be held. Petted? Oh, yeah. She’s got a double coat. She’s Chow and Australian Cattle Dog. She never stops shedding and it’s like milkweed fluff. Enough hair gathers in the corner of any room at any given time to make a whole new dog. Their photos are on my website (http://reneeashleyatwork.com -hit “contact” and then “dogs”! Check them out.) They’re such characters. I have no family to speak of (my mother is one hundred and lives in California, she’s the sole blood connection) except for my husband and a number of dear friends. I could easily just retreat from the outside world into my rattling head, but the dogs keep me tied to the earth. All that pooping and eating and “Let’s throw the stuffed armadillo out the back door again!” So, I guess I don’t know what they’ve taught me, but I do know they have saved me.
ML: Let's talk about process. What do you need in the physical realm to write good poems? And, to follow through with process, what prompts your poems and how do you follow through when you're on to something? I do remember being with you at Madison, when you walked toward your dorm saying, “I'm working on something I've got to get it down.”
RA: I need quiet. And, at best, no prospect of being interrupted, which is why, when I’m working, I like to work through the night. And a computer; I do compose, if I’m able, on the computer. It’s so automatic… it poses the fewest obstacles between me and getting my thoughts down. I do jot things on paper when something comes and I’m on the hoof or in the car—I’m always ready for that—but I prefer the keyboard. I can close my eyes (when I’m writing prose) and just write. And, when I’m working on a poem, I can’t judge a line well unless I can see it typed. I need to see how the line-ends work in concert; I need to see what I’ve made to happen in the left margin. And if the middles sag. Yes, I can hear it, but I need to see it to be comfortable before moving on.
My poems generally start with an image or a thought in combination with a rhythm. I don’t write poems from ideas. I did that once and it was too much like painting by the numbers or filling out a tax form—and I’m unlikely to surprise myself in a poem if I’m working from an idea and, so, why bother? Deadly things for me in poems, ideas. I try not to have them. Whatever I begin with usually takes the title position and the poem is discovered and aligned beneath it, one line at a time. And when it stops singing and starts just talking, then it’s time to put it away until it quickens again. Which, sometimes, may be a very long time. Sometimes just after a snack.
ML: On a less technical note, how does your day-to-day shape your writing?
RA: Oh arrrrgh. My day-to-day is stultifying, decidedly boring, and pretty unproductive. I don’t write from my exterior life much anymore because nothing’s going on. I’m trying to swear off crises. And I’m a very stop-and-go writer. I write in spurts. I’ll write hot for a week or two and then not write at all for a month or for many months. And then go off on another toot of writing hot. I’m always thinking about writing—I suppose something is always percolating—but I don’t do it much. And if you’re not doing it, not getting it on paper, you’re not writing. I’m the world’s worst role model.
ML:Did you ever consider anything other than writing for your mental or spiritual expression of this journey?
RA: Oh, my! What a great notion! But my answer, I’m afraid, fails to fulfill the promise of the question. I have never been one to project into the future. The day at hand is tough enough. I didn’t even consider having a mental or spiritual expression or journey! Not that I saw it and chose to ignore it; it just never occurred to me. I just stayed alive each day. I’m a treader-of-water. The truth—which is the same thing, but canted differently—is that there’s absolutely nothing else I’m capable of doing decently. I’m wholly unfit for the world at large. Living in my head and watching fragments of that take shape on paper is all I know. I can’t draw a lick, have no talent for or interest in sports, have really crappy home-ec skills, would have been a dreadful parent. Wait. I can drive just about anything. I might have made a really good long-haul truck driver—as long as there was some provision for audiobooks. But that’s probably not a good life for a dog. And, besides, I’m a nester. I like having all my crap around me. Never mind. It wouldn’t have worked.
ML: What detours really stand out as pivotal moments in your writing life?
RA: Hmmm. Do you mean life detours? If so, then the truly pivotal event would be my father’s suicide when I was sixteen. I didn’t write about it at all until about seventeen years after it happened; I wrote an essay and thought I was done. Then about seventeen years after that I wrote another essay and thought, Certainly I’m done now. But since then he’s been just about everywhere. Can’t shake him and am trying to keep him under control. I have a lot of guilt about my father, who was a very unhappy, very gentle man. My mother threw him out when I was really young. I used to think to myself, very self-righteously I might add, that Sharon Olds should bury her father and get over it! And now I’m in the same, if not worse, father-propelled boat. I cannot get over my father. I didn’t know him that well, but enough to break my heart. And I was complicit in his suicide. That’s a weight. I write a great deal about my mother, too, particularly in essays and hybrid pieces. My mother’s just a funny piece of work. My father, not so funny. More emblematic, I guess. So I guess I could say there are scenes from my life that make their appearances and allow other baggage to come along and be explored at the same time. Perhaps they’re like the thick metal pins those old fashioned audio tapes on big reels used to click onto, with the tape wound on each and strung between both: each of my parents a pin at the extreme end and I’m the tape that runs between them, pissing and moaning along. It’s nuts. I’m sixty-two and still fixated on my parents. It’s just plain embarrassing. Sharon Olds, I’m truly sorry.
ML: Can writing clarify our life experience or how we make meaning?
RA: I write to find out what I think, there’s no doubt about that: Yes. Writing clarifies life experience if we try to be honest, in at least the parts we choose to address. The essays and hybrid pieces I’ve written about my mother have forced me to articulate a lot of what was simply muddy thinking before I had to write it down and make it, first, understandable and second, both meaningful and entertaining.
Remember me saying, in the beginning, that clarity is overrated in poetry? Well, it’s not true in prose. I really believe articulation is the key to understanding just about everything. The trick is to push that articulation further than you’d like to—and I’m not talking about adding adjectives. Make yourself sweat. If you want to run away, you’re probably on the right track.