Lee
This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
A strange conversion experience has happened to religion here in the Bible Belt. Once it was known and sung; a key to social transformation, this simple fact.
[“Wade in the Water” plays]
Yes, the force that once troubled waters gets domesticated, used by the mighty, the pharaohs, the princes of war, and the sultans of sales.
[“Wade in the Water” continues to play]
So perhaps one of the key questions to living life well in our contemporary world is how to get troubled. Poetry, anyone? This seems unlikely, and yet perhaps it could give us...
Tracy
...courage for facing the real and all of its troubling dimensions.
Lee
This is U.S. Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith. She suggests that poetry has the capacity to unsettle something. She says there is a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do. New York Poet Laureate Marie Howe says something similar. She too seems concerned for the need of a little troubling of the status quo.
Marie
The great thing about poetry for me, which saved my life, really, is poetry can try to hold the unsayable truth about being alive, knowing that we're alive and that we're going to die. We're under a constant spell of consumerism, right? So poetry is a counter spell in that it says, “Be here exactly as you are.”
Lee
Welcome to this episode of the Tokens podcast. Our interviews with Tracy K. Smith and Marie Howe in just a moment. Listen slowly. Perhaps you'll get troubled.
[“Wade in the Water” plays]
Lee
We're privileged to host Pulitzer Prize winning author and currently sitting U.S. Poet Laureate, please welcome the PLOTUS. Tracy K Smith.
[Applause]
I was pleased to discover in the archives that Bob Dylan apparently did that old spiritual back in, I think in 1960 or 1961. But I understand that this spiritual, obviously, was inspiration for your new book entitled Wade in the Water. So tell us about that.
Tracy
Oh, absolutely. I'd been working on poems that were thinking about history and thinking about America in the 21st century, and then I took a trip to coastal Georgia and I attended a ring shout where this song was performed, and even before the performance began, one of the women, her name is Bertha McKnight, greeted me and everyone else that she came into contact with that night by saying, “I love you” and giving a hug. And it felt so real. It set the tone for the really powerful performance, and I came back, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and I wanted to kind of dive into that feeling a little bit more by writing a poem.
Lee
In a recent interview in New York Times magazine, you said that you want a poem to unsettle something. You said there's a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do. Talk to us about that.
Tracy
You know, we're drawn to reflect on powerful experiences because there's something we don't necessarily feel that we've tapped, right? And if I'm writing a poem, I want to unearth something that I haven't gotten my head around yet. Sometimes it's just an abundant kind of joy. Other times, or oftentimes, it's something that's a little bit darker, something that shakes me out of an easy sense of certainty that I might have, something that shows me there's a different and stranger way of looking at something.
Lee
It does seem, in your current collection, that you have these poems that, on the one hand, are very disturbing that would stir up all sorts of kinds of sociopolitical questions, and yet, on the other hand, you seem to, especially with one that you're gonna do later tonight, you seem to be looking for ways of reconciliation and common grounds. How do you hold both of those things together in your work?
Tracy
Well, I think it just speaks to the capacity of art to allow us a vocabulary and even a sense of courage for facing the real and all of its troubling dimensions. And also it urges us to draw upon the kinds of resources that we have to confront that, you know, live with it in a way that's productive.
Lee
And so in this work, Wade in the Water, you went back and worked out of real historical sources and fashioned that into your lines, right?
Tracy
Yeah. I was listening to voices from mostly America's antebellum history and trying to find something that could be useful today, something that might urge me to think - or us to think - differently about questions of difference, questions of race and fear that we haven't really resolved.
Lee
And in the “I will tell you the truth about this. I will tell you all about it,” you're using excerpts actually from depositions of veterans is that, right? And so these would have been former slaves. Who fought in the war...
Tracy
In the civil war, and then after the war, sometimes well into the 20th century, were petitioning to get the pensions that as veterans they should have been entitled to. That's a poem that's really comprised of statements and letters, so I'll read you two letters. This one is from Nashville, Tennessee. August 12th, 1865.
“Dear wife, I am in earnest about you coming and that as soon as possible. It is no use to say anything about any money, for if you come up here, which I hope you will, it will be alright as to the money matters. I want to see you and the children very bad. I can get a house at any time. I will say the word, so you need not to fear as to that. So come right on just as soon as you get this. I want you to tell me the name of the baby that was born since I left. I am your affectionate husband until death.”
And the reply that came from Clarksville on August 28th. It says:
“Dear husband, I guess you would like to know the reason why that I did not come when you wrote for, and that is because I had not the money and could not get it. And if you will send me the money or come after me, I will come. They sent out soldiers from here after old Riley and they have got him in jail and one of his sons, and they have his brother Elias here in jail. Dear husband, if you are coming after me, I want you to come before it get too cold.”
[Applause]
Lee
I was particularly moved also by the piece in the work, “The Greatest Personal Privation.” And in this one, you're working not out of documentary sources, but you are reflecting upon a historical incident and yet kind of imagining what the players were saying, is that right?
Tracy
Yeah. So, you know, there's... I felt lucky to find those letters and depositions that documented the experience of black soldiers during and after the war. But there's so much that went undocumented and I found in a really wonderful history called Dwelling Place by Erskine Clarke a series of letters that were written back and forth by the Charles Colcock Jones family - who was a slaveholding family - letters in which they were trying to decide what to do with a family that they held enslaved, that had been causing some problems. And they were trying to decide, should we sell them? What should we do? There was only one letter that was written by a member of that family that survived, and in it she says, well, “We were sold. This is who is doing what, this is who survived.” But I really wanted to hear more from that side of the equation. And so what I did was a kind of an act of like willful imagining where I took the language from the Jones family's letters and I tried to listen almost underneath that text for the voices of people like Patience or Phoebe - members of that family, of people that were held in bondage to them. I'll read you a couple of sections of that poem:
“It is a painful and harassing business belonging to her. We have had trouble enough, have no comfort or confidence in them, and they appear unhappy themselves, no doubt from the trouble they have occasioned. They could dispose of the whole family without consulting us. Father, mother, every good cook, washer, and seamstress subject to sale. I believe good shall be glad if we may have hope of the loss of trouble. I remain in glad conscience, at peace with God and the world. I have prayed for those people many, many, very many times. In every probability, we may yet discover the whole country will not come back from the sale of parent and child. So far as I can see, the loss is great and increasing. I know they have desired we should not know what was for our own good, but we cannot be all the cause of all that has been done.”
I had a dream one night, uh, in Vermont that I was reading a poem that was another poet's poem that had been printed on a big wall. And then part of my mind woke up and said, “That's not another person's poem. That's nobody's poem. And if you wake up, you can write it.” So I woke up and I sat up into the night trying to recapture this poem that I'd seen in the dream. And because I was in Vermont, it was kind of a pastural poem about two mowers. And a few years later, I read it in Washington D.C. and I said, “Oh, this isn't really a pastural poem. This is a political poem.” “Political poem:”
“If those mowers were each to stop at the whim, say, of a greedy thought, and then the one off to the left were to let his arm float up, stirring the air with that wide, slow, underwater gesture, meaning ‘Hello' and ‘You there!' aimed at the one more than a mile away to the right, and if he in his work were to pause, catching that call by sheer wish and send back his own slow one-armed dance meaning ‘Yes' and ‘Here' as if threaded to a single long nerve before remembering his tool and shearing another message into the earth, letting who can say how long graze past until another thought or just the need to know might make him stop and look up again at the other, raising his arm as if to say something like ‘Still' and ‘Oh' and then, to catch the flicker of joy, rise up along those other legs and flare into another bright ‘Yes' that sways a moment in the darkening air, their work would carry them into the better part of evening, each mowing ahead and doubling back, then looking up to catch sight of his echo, sought and held in that instant of common understanding, the God and speed of it coming out only after both have turned back to face the sea of yet and slow. If they could and if what glimmered like a fish were to dart back and forth across that wide wordless distance, the day, though gone, would never know the ache of being done. If they thought to, or would, or even half wanted their work, the humming human engines pushed across the grass, and the grass, blade after blade, assenting would take forever, but I love how long it would last.”
[Applause]
Lee
You are listening to Tokens, public theology, human flourishing, the good life. This is episode three and you've just been listening to our live interview with U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. We are most grateful to have you joining us and we would be most delighted if you would leave us one of those five star reviews on Apple podcasts and subscribe there or wherever you subscribe to podcasts.
In addition, please subscribe to our YouTube channel at Tokens Show and subscribe to our email list at tokensshow.com. Remember, you can find out more details, links, photos about our guests by visiting our website. Coming up our interview with Marie Howe.
You are listening to Tokens. In part two today is our delightful interview with poet Marie Howe. Enjoy.
Marie Howe is a New York state poet Laureate. She's authored four volumes of poetry, the most recent entitled Magdalene: Poems. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Poetry, and a host of additional publications. She writes a sort of deeply honest and intimate poetry that made me say aloud after my friend Britton Orville gave me one of your volumes of poetry a couple of years ago... I stopped in the middle of the book at one point and said aloud, “Oh my. Oh, how I'd be grateful to sit long and talk with Marie Howe.” And here she is. Please welcome Marie Howe. Welcome.
Marie
I want to take this opportunity to say this is the only place I've ever been where you people say Laureate. Poet Laureate.
Lee
Marie
It makes it sound so pretty. Poet Laureate.
Lee
Yes [laughs]. We're delighted to have a poet Laureate among us. So, raised Catholic, I believe?
Marie
I was raised Catholic. I was one... the oldest girl of nine children.
Lee
Marie
Oldest… well, no, I'm the oldest girl, which is like being the oldest.
[laughter]
I was the second oldest. I had a brother - God bless him, I love him - Tommy, who abdicated early.
[laughter]
You know the Irish, you know the girls. She's the oldest.
Lee
Right. So raised in this large, vibrant family, in your work, you seem always to be operating loosely but it seems intentionally out of this sort of engagement with biblical or larger Christian tradition. So Mary in one of your books, or Mary Magdalene is the new one, what's that? How does that operate for you?
Marie
You're such a beautiful talker, Lee. Do you believe what he set up there a few minutes ago? About time? Can we just take a minute and say how beautiful that was? Truly.
[Applause]
Because time is the thing I've been thinking about so much lately. Aren't we all thinking about time? We don't have enough time. I'm sorry, I forgot your question.
[Laughter]
I really did, because...
Lee
That's okay, because I liked what you just said...
Marie
I was so moved… I was just reading the last notes anyone took about Thomas Merton before he went to Bangkok where he was going to give his talk and die. He went to a monastery in northern California and he was talking to people and brother David took notes and he was talking about time and he was saying, “Consumer capitalism has stolen time from us, so we forever feel indebted.” We feel an indebtedness to a system that we've never... has nothing to do with our lives. And he said, “We're sharecroppers of time, and we can stop,” because he talks about God's time and human... and this consumer time. Um, so anyway, I just wanted to say...
Lee
So, how for you... how does poetry operate for you in going back to the tradition out of which you...
Marie
You're trying to get back to that question.
[Laughter]
Lee
Yeah. I want to hear your answer to that question.
Marie
Well, speaking of time... so these characters I grew up… well the Jewish tradition has a tradition of Midrash where the Torah, or what we used to call the Old Testament, is a living document, and you bring your imagination to it and to the study of it, and to those who studied it before you, and you imagine yourself into these stories, into the silences in these stories. That's sort of like poetry. And when you think of the gospels, for example, of Jesus, and they're such gorgeous stories that have so much silence in them, so these characters always moved me from when I was a young girl, and as I've grown, I find myself going back and back to them in writing in a kind of Midrash way to understand what it is to be human. Through these characters.
Lee
You've spoken also about how tradition and memory get us simply to pay attention to the present. How does that... how do you see that working?
Marie
Well, you already said it. You said time present, and time past, and time future are all here at once. Einstein said the same thing, you know? And, that's the fullness of time. So we live in those layers, right? We live in those layers and poetry… the great thing about poetry for me, which saved my life, really is first of all, poetry can try to hold the unsayable truth about being alive, knowing that we're alive and that we're going to die. You know, we're one of the only animals, as far as we know, that is constantly aware of our mortality even as we're living. So there's that. And then it also calls us to the present moment. It calls us to our senses, so that we're nowhere else but right here, right now, which is all time.
Lee
Yeah. I'm reminded of your poem “The Gate” that seems to me to draw very much attention to the present moment...
Marie
Lee
Can you share that one with us?
Marie
Sure. This book is called What the Living Do, and the center of the book is some stories about my brother John. John was one of the youngest of our family, one of my dearest friends, and he died after living with the AIDS virus in 1989. John was really a spiritual teacher to me. He got sober at 23 and he died at 28. “The Gate:”
“I had no idea that the gate I would step through to finally enter this world would be the space my brother's body made. He was taller than me, a young man, but grown. Himself, by then. Done at 28, having folded every sheet, rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold and running water. “This is what you have been waiting for,” he used to say to me, and I would say, “What?” And he would say, “This,” holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich. And I would say, “What?” And he would say, “This,” sort of looking around.
Lee
You've... and it resonates with what you just did with us in forest there in that you've spoken of poetry as a counterspell.
Marie
Lee
Tell us what you mean by that and kind of maybe set up “The Seven Devils,” maybe.
Marie
There's a giant outside.
[Laughter]
Let's run. Listen, it's really... it's a giant. It's coming. Or maybe it's the goddess, and she's finally here.
[Laughter]
Lee
Some of them got it, yeah.
Marie
I just have to say Nashville is pretty close to paradise. I'm going to go back to New York and tell everybody.
Lee
No!
[Laughter]
We're glad that you're here. You can move. No, no, no. One of you is fine, but no more New Yorkers. Yeah. Or LA people.
Marie
Well, first of all, everybody from New York is from somewhere else. Okay? But Marianne, my friend, told me that every day 90 new people move to Nashville. I guess you know that.
[Laughter]
A counter spell. What did I say about that? Well, we're under a constant spell of consumerism, right? You're having a feeling? Go out and buy something, right? You're having a feeling? Eat something, drink something. So poetry is a counterspell in that it says, “Be here exactly as you are. Be here and all your vulnerability. Be here in your bewilderment. You are not alone.” I had this great counterspell. She came home. There was some mean girl thing going on in school. I wish she were here because she could do it, but it's like, “Don't make me snap my fingers in a Z formation, exclamation. Talk to the hand. Talk to the wrist. Ooh, girl, you just got dissed. Oh, let her fall. I got it all. You don't. I do so poof with the attitude,” and it's this whole thing.
[Laughter]
It's like, poof with the attitude? It's like, poof. You have to do that. Anyway, it's a counterspell and I thought that's what poetry is. Okay, so you really want “The Seven Devils” right now?
Lee
This is one of the central points from your new book, Magdalene. Which is a reflection upon Mary Magdalene.
Marie
So all the women in the room... many of the women in the room, I'm sure know how much we have suffered in Magdalene's name. Magdalene was turned, I'm sure without meaning any harm, by the early church fathers into a prostitute, which she was not, and into a repentant sinner, and thereby became the archetype for the sensual woman who was ashamed. And I feel as if women have carried this wound, the split, the duality between body and soul, sensuality and spirituality, the profane and the sacred, for centuries. And it's a terrible wound. And this book is an attempt to describe that wound and then to attempt to begin to heal it and to integrate those aspects of oneself. But this poem, the only thing we know about Magdalene from the gospels is that she had been possessed by seven devils and they had been cast out. So this is Magdalene talking about those devils in a very contemporary voice:
“The first was that I was so busy. The second, I was different from you. Whatever happened to you could not happen to me. Not like that. The third, I worried. The fourth, envy disguised as compassion. The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid. The aphid disgusted me, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. The mosquito too - its face - and the ant, it's bifurcated or trifurcated body. Okay the first was that I was so busy. The second, that I might make the wrong choice because I had decided to take that plane that day, that flight before noon, so as to arrive early and I shouldn't have wanted that. The third was that if I walked past a certain place on the street, the house might blow up. The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with a thin layer of skin lightly thrown over the whole thing. The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living. The sixth, if I touched my right arm, I had to touch my left arm, and if I touched the left arm a little harder than I'd first touched the right, then I had to retouch the left and then touch the right again so it would be even. The seventh, I knew I was breathing the expelled breath of everything that was alive and I couldn't stand it. I wanted a sieve, a mask, a - I hate this word - a cheese cloth to breathe through that would trap it. Whatever was inside everyone else that entered me when I breathed in. No, that was the first one. The second was that I was so busy. I had no time. How had this happened? How had our lives gotten like this? The third was that I couldn't eat food if I really saw it distinct and separate from me in a bowl or on a plate. Okay. The first was that I could never get to the end of the list. The second was that the laundry was never finally done. The third was that no one knew me, although they thought they did, and that if people thought of me as little as I thought of them, then what was love? The fourth was that I didn't belong to anyone. I wouldn't allow myself to belong to anyone. The fifth was that I knew none of us could ever know what we didn't know. The sixth, was that I projected onto others what I myself was feeling. The seventh, well, it was the way my mother looked when she was dying, the sound she made, her mouth rent to the right and cupped open so as to take in as much air. The gurgling sound, so loud we had to speak louder to hear each other over it and then I couldn't stop hearing it. Years later. Grocery shopping. Crossing the street. No, not the sound. It was her body's hunger, finally evident. What our mother had hidden all her life. For months, I dreamt the knuckle bones and roots, the slabs of sidewalk, pushed up like crooked teeth by what grew underneath. The underneath. That was the first devil. It was always with me and then I didn't think you, if I told you, would understand any of this.”
I was trying to write some poems one day. I was working on about four of them over the course of many hours, and I finally gave up and decided I was just going to write a letter to my dead brother, John. And it ended up being the poem that wanted to be written all day. It's called “What the Living Do.”
“That's us. Johnny. The kitchen sink has been clogged for days. Some utensil probably fell down there, and the Draino won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes are piled up waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the every day we spoke of. It's winter again. The sky is a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through the open living room windows, because the heat's stuck on too high in here and I can't turn it off. For weeks now, driving or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, I've been thinking: this is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks and the Cambridge sidewalks, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again, and again later when buying a hairbrush: this is it. Parking, slamming the car door shut in the cold, what you called that yearning. What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss. We want more and more, and then more of it. But there are moments walking when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless. I am living. I remember you.”
Lee
You've done a lot of work working through your own family history and family memories. In what way has poetry helped you process the good and the painful in your own family upbringing?
Marie
That's a big question, Lee. Well, the great thing about making music, as these people know, or making poetry, or making paintings, or making anything, is that everybody lives a life that has great joy, great pain, great loveliness, great loss in it. But to work in an art is to make something of it, and in making something of it, you engage with something you can't see. Some people call it a muse or a higher power or whatever, and through that process, there's transformation. So, much is changed in the process of making something out of it. I've found it very healing.
Lee
Why do you think poetry in particular has been a process of healing for you?
Marie
Well, you know, like we said earlier, it's a kind of counterspell. Also, if you find a way to hold what can't be said, but using words as making a kind of box for what can't be said, and you make it well enough so it doesn't rattle when you shake it, then you can let it go.
Lee
One more that you want to share with us kind of in that vein?
Marie
Lee
Marie
As you know, I mentioned earlier, I come from a large family and we had a happy, chaotic home. So here is a poem called “The Game,” which celebrates something we used to do together:
“And on certain nights, maybe once or twice a year, I'd carry the baby down and all the kids would come, all nine of us together, and we'd build a town in the basement from boxes and blankets and overturned chairs, and some lived under the pool table or in the bathroom or the boiler room or in the toy cupboard under the stairs. And you could be a man or a woman, a husband or a wife or a child. And we bustled around like a day in the village until one of us turned off the lights, switch by switch, and slowly it became night and the people slept. Our parents were upstairs with company or not fighting, and one of us - it was usually a boy - became the town crier. And he walked around our little sleeping population and tolled the hours with his voice, and this was the game. “9:00, and all is well,” he'd say, walking like a constable we must've seen in a movie, and what we called an hour passed. 10:00 and all is well. And maybe somebody stirred in her sleep or a grownup baby cried and was comforted. 11:00 and all is well, 12:00, 1:00, 2:00, and it went on like that through the night we made up until we could pretend it was morning.”
Lee
Ms. Marie Howe.
[Applause]
Grateful you've been listening to Tokens, public theology, human flourishing, the good life. Love to beg of you a humble request that you would leave us one of those five star reviews on Apple podcasts and subscribe there, or wherever you listen. You can find more details, links, photos about our guests this episode by visiting tokensshow.com/podcast.
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