THE POET’S PERSPECTIVE:

AN INTERVIEW WITH SUSAN ELIZABETH HOWE
By Douglas Talley

Susan Elizabeth Howe teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University and was the featured poet of a previous Meridian poetry column.  Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah and other journals.  Her book, Stone Spirits, was published by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at BYU.  The following Meridian Magazine interview of Professor Howe examines several recurring themes in the book and her views about the art of poetry. 

MERIDIAN:   One of the intriguing elements in a number of the poems in Stone Spirits is your sense of the vast stretch of time and how it can be compressed into the present.

            From “Things in the Night Sky”:

            From “The Paleontologist with an Ear Infection”:

What is your interest in capturing time in this manner, on such a grand, geologic scale?  Are you suggesting the “eternal moment” is simply a compilation of innumerable years, or something else?

HOWE:   My initial reasons for writing about these vast reaches of time is that when I was exploring the three subjects of these poems—the galaxies in the universe, a dinosaur, and the southern Utah landscape—I felt the need to try to grasp those immense distances of time and space.  And, indeed, I do feel that they can help us understand the difference between our perspective and God’s perspective.  If the creation of the Earth took four billion years, and humans have only been here for about ten thousand of those years, we can scarcely comprehend the processes of the creation, much less of the eternities.  I think we have a tendency to reduce God’s power and thought to our own levels, and I think we ought to be a lot more humble than that, aware of the immense difference between God’s knowledge and our own. 

MERIDIAN:   Lines like these suggest that poetry can almost effortlessly transform the human perspective into a godlike perspective, as for example when William Blake wrote:

Do you believe poetry has an inherent power, not just to inform our sense of the divine perspective, but to actually grant us that perspective on occasion?  Do you think it can actually transform us into a more divine nature?  Why, or why not?

HOWE:   I suppose it is possible, if a poet is both in tune with God and gifted with language, to convey God’s perspective in a poem.  Whether such a perspective is received or not will also depend on the spiritual condition of the reader.  But I think most poetry, including my own, has much more modest aims.  The impetus for my poems is almost always an attempt to understand why an experience or image or story I have heard has impressed itself so forcefully on my mind—what does it mean to me?  And because what makes our lives meaningful is associated with our beliefs, I hope that what I believe (basically, Mormon doctrines) informs my poems in some way.  But I would never claim to be able to assume a divine perspective in my poems; I’m much too mortal and limited for that. 

MERIDIAN:   Another delightful element in your work is your sense of the comic.  It’s readily evident even in the titles of some of the poems, such as “The Paleontologist with an Ear Infection” and “In the Cemetery, Studying Embryos”.  The idea seems irresistible in your work that the comic perspective is also rather godlike, that there is a gentle omniscient presence looking down upon human affairs, and on occasion, chuckling.  Is this intended, or is it reading too much into the poems?  What sense of humor, if any, do you attribute to God?

HOWE:   Yes, I believe that God has a sense of humor because humor is associated with happiness and also provides us with a means of coping with grief and distress.  So I see humor as good, and I believe that all good qualities originate with God.  But again, I don’t think that I have the capacity to convey God’s sense of humor, just my own. “In the Cemetery, Studying Embryos” is about resurrection, and it tickles me that many readers have seen that.  But to think of mortal remains as embryonic in the sense that they are waiting for another birth was just an idea that came to me while I was sitting in a cemetery one day.  It certainly arises from my beliefs, but I don’t know that I feel comfortable attributing it to God.  I don’t really feel qualified to speak for God. 

MERIDIAN:   You also allow, quite sympathetically, for the tragic, as evident in your bittersweet elegy, “To My Brother in His Casket”.  How did the writing of that poem help you deal with your loss?  Can poetry help us reconcile the tragic?

HOWE:   My friend Peter Makuck, the editor of Tar River Poetry, taught me that poetry can be healing to someone who is trying to deal with loss or injury.  To write about pain—what has caused it, how it feels—can help the writer release that pain, and readers who have suffered the same or similar experiences are comforted in reading the poems and learning that their own feelings are shared by others.  One of the greatest poems to show a passage through grief to eventual resolution and peace is Tennyson’s In Memoriam.  My twenty-year-old brother was killed on his mission in an automobile accident.  His death was one of the most difficult losses of my life to reconcile and accept.  I hope that my poem is something of a memorial to him.  I hope it expresses my love for him and my huge sense of loss at his death. 

MERIDIAN:   The opening section of poems in Stone Spirits is titled “The world is hard, not of your making”, a line taken from the poem “ArchAngel”.  A number of the poems describe a physical world which is harsh, where “[m]ore ruin waits for weather . . . .” as stated in the poem “Lessons of Erosion”.  How do you reconcile your faith with the harshness of the physical world?

HOWE:   It is not just the physical world that is harsh.  Humans suffer horrendous trials; I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been through terrible pain, physical or emotional or both.   I hope that in my poems the harshness of the physical world suggests the harshness of what we sometimes suffer.  But if I understand the purpose of life, real, high-stake struggles are necessary or we won’t ever grow morally or spiritually.  God has honored us with agency so that we can actually become more godlike; Christ has made it possible for us to repent when we mess up so that we can try again. 

MERIDIAN:   A previous Meridian column published one of your finest poems, “Mary Keeps All These Things”, and the response of Meridian’s readership was quite favorable.  One reader printed out the poem and inserted it into her scriptures between pages 1274 and 1275 of Luke 2.  Tell us about the inspiration for that poem and how it developed. 

HOWE:   One Christmas season it occurred to me that the person most involved in Christ’s birth, in addition to him, was his mother, and yet we have no account of the experience from her perspective.  So I tried to imagine what the whole long event was like for her and let her speak in her own voice. 

MERIDIAN:   What directed you toward poetry in the first place?  Were there defining moments in your life when you knew you wanted to be a poet?  Whatever possessed you to pursue this “finikin” art, as Wallace Stevens put it? 

HOWE:   I wrote poetry in high school and my early college years, but just for myself—I had received no training, not even in high school English classes.  In college, I majored in Spanish and minored in French, and then after graduating I immediately realized that I’d majored in the wrong subjects (though they have been useful in teaching me how language works as well as some of the relationships between English and other Romance languages).  So I didn’t begin to train in poetry until my master’s and doctoral programs.  Then I took several poetry writing classes even though I thought I would primarily be a fiction writer and a dramatist.  One of the major forces in my development as a poet was a friend in my doctoral program, George Bilgere.  He is a very fine poet, and for about a year we had a pact that we would write a new poem and exchange it every week.  That constant writing helped me learn the discipline of poetry.  What finally turned me to poetry as my primary art form was that I began publishing poems in literary journals before I even had any stories ready to send out.  That was a clue to me that I was a better poet than fiction writer. 

MERIDIAN:   How would you describe your principal literary influences?  What authors do you return to and why?

HOWE:   Anyone who wants to be a poet should constantly be reading poetry, and so I read a great deal.  I try to read the current volume of The Best American Poetry each year, and I subscribe to two or three literary journals where I am trying to place poems.  This means I am exposed to many contemporary poets, and when I encounter one whose work I admire, I buy that poet’s collections and read in depth, trying to look at everything from subject matter to rhetorical strategies to figurative language.  I often copy individual poems into a notebook, because I think that writing helps me observe the individual words and the lines more thoroughly.  I also memorize a few new poems each year so that I will have them in my head.  Some of the poets I have read in depth include Mark Jarman, Chase Twichell, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, Mary Oliver, and Maxine Kumin.  A couple of years ago, I found a remarkable new poet named Morrie Creech.  I recommend all these poets very highly; they are a joy to read. 

MERIDIAN:   Tell us about your writing habits.  Do you work at it every day?  Do you have a particular schedule or discipline to stay at the work, even when it’s not going well?  Do you have any “tricks” for working through the blocks?

HOWE:   I wish I could write every day, but during the semester I have to devote most of my time to teaching, so I usually write only two or three days a week.  I eagerly await summer and semester breaks because then I have more time.  It is hard for me to settle in and start writing, so I always read poems for about half an hour at the beginning of a writing session.  This moves me over into my more creative self as well as giving me models of several fine poems in my head.  I write first drafts by hand on the back of scratch paper.  This lowers the stakes for me.  “It’s just scratch paper,” I say, “it doesn’t matter if what I write isn’t very good.”  Early drafts are almost never very good, but they usually have the seeds of what can become a better poem.  I always have more ideas for poems than I’m able to get to; I try to work on about five poems in each session, and then I come back to those poems until I haven’t found things to revise in about four readings.  I wouldn’t dream of sending anything out to be published until I had taken it to my poetry group and responded to their suggestions. 

MERIDIAN:   How has your work as a teacher of creative writing helped shape your own poetry?

HOWE:   I try to assign exercises that give my students a new imaginative space from which to write a poem, and as often as I can, I also complete those exercises.  They have led to some of my best poems, especially in the last few years. 

MERIDIAN:   What value do you see in the “workshop” approach to creative writing promoted by colleges and universities?  Are workshops a good idea?  Why or why not?

HOWE:   I’ve found that I can’t just turn beginning writers loose in a workshop because they are not critical readers; they themselves don’t recognize the difference between a strong line and a weak line, vague imagery and specific sensory imagery and so forth.  So I don’t use workshops in introductory classes.  But in intermediate and advanced classes, workshops are invaluable.  By the end of the semester, students are able to find other writers whose work they respect, and they often form writing groups with these other class members.  Workshops are helpful to me because if a student hears that several other readers don’t understand a line or an image, she is much more likely to accept my own criticism of the problem.  The main difficulty with workshops is that they can lead to poems that all sound alike; students have to be warned not to try to rewrite another student’s poem but to let him know what its strengths and weaknesses are on the writer’s own terms. 

MERIDIAN:   Do you believe in a “Mormon” school of poetry, like the Augustans or the Pre-Raphaelites? Do you want to see a body of art that is distinctly Mormon?  Why or why not?

HOWE:   In my mind, the question you ask is a question of audience:  should there be a body of art created for a Mormon audience (using language and symbols and references that only those within the culture will understand) or should Mormon artists consider the larger culture as the audience for their art?  I think that our culture is mature enough to support art for both audiences, and that the artist’s talent and interests will suggest the audience she should create for.  Both can be subsumed under the category “Mormon art.”  But standards of craftsmanship should be high regardless of audience and regardless of medium.  I am encouraged by the excellence that I see developing in Mormon art in so many different mediums—drama, film, the novel, visual art, and music as well as poetry.  It seems to me that in many ways our culture is coming of age, and that many very talented Mormons are using their gifts to bless our culture and the larger American culture as well. 

MERIDIAN:   In summary, tell us how your faith has influenced your poetry and your approach to your work.

HOWE:   The very perceptive questions you have posed in this interview point out how my faith has influenced my poetry.  The specific subject matter of my poems is not usually religious, but my perspective on my subject is often the result of my faith.  Flannery O’Connor said that her definition of Catholic art was the Catholic mind working on any subject (my paraphrase, not an exact quotation).  That is a definition that I apply to Mormon poetry—a Mormon mind working on any subject. 

MERIDIAN:   What advice do you have for the aspiring Mormon writer?

HOWE:   I’ve pretty much already given it:  read all the time; read a variety of contemporary poets; give yourself permission to write bad early drafts and then work on them; get yourself a writing group with other poets whose criticism you respect.  One more thing:  you have to send your work out to literary journals and keep it out until it is accepted.  No one will ever come to you and beg you to let them publish your poems; that’s just not how the system works. 

From Stone Spirits by Susan Elizabeth Howe

The Paleontologist with an Ear Infection