james stotts : part five

how does a poem begin?

a poem really can’t begin until there’s a sense that it needs to be something new, so it’s always the variation that’s dawning on me.  there gets to be a number of occasions that always force the point.  when my [ex-]wife was pregnant, i started writing sonnets and counting the weeks.  the terror and delight of expecting meant that i was able to keep up a good pace that carried me for almost two years, until jackson’s first birthday.  we were also just arrived in a new city, boston, and taking a lot of bus rides down to nyc to see my brother, visit the russian consulate, and cetera.  and ten years later, i’m still writing china bus sonnets every time i take the ride.  so the patterns of life, instead of becoming repetitive, always put me in a receptive and determined mood.

those are very different than the poems that strike, almost like panic attacks, at all hours, where the mind gets sucked into a sort of vortex.  those only get resolved by coming to terms.

the poems hardly ever begin or end on the page, they get going with a phrase or puzzle or rhyme, and then i will work them over in my mind on long walks or trips or in wee hours.  i usually know the poem is finished by the time i have it really by memory and when i stop tripping over certain lines.  a little more might change after i put it to paper, but by that time, most of the leg work has already been put in.

james stotts : part four

what poets changed the way you think about poetry?

the first poetry i remember really devouring was margaret atwood and lucille clifton.  that’s probably not typical.  i got over atwood, but clifton is still my first hero.  i didn’t realize for almost twenty years that my poems look like hers on the page—no punctuation and no uppercase.  she’s always been in my blood.  when i was ten i was challenged by a teacher to memorize ‘the raven,’ and did it in a week.  that same week i memorized ‘the bells,’ ‘annabel lee,’ and a few others.  and i read all the stories, really.  i outgrew poe, too, but supplementally.

i found an anthology when i was eleven or twelve, of the yale younger poets.  so ashbery was there, and a dozen other i love, but the best and the one i obsessed over was joan murray.  especially her ‘lullaby.’

when i was thirteen, there was a statewide poetry recitation competition in the gym at la cueva high school, in albuquerque.  i recited stevie smith’s ‘distractions and the human crowd,’ donald justice’s ‘there is a golden light in certain old paintings’ (which is an orpheus poem), and ‘nothing gold can stay.’  i remember a lot of other kids doing ‘the love song,’ and the parents and teachers were impressed, but i could have read that by heart, too.  i got a bronze medal.  i guess the point is, that i was learning from them and wanted to be them someday.  i was in love then with edna st. vincent millay, cummings, hayden, and almost everyone in our schoolbooks.

i was sixteen or seventeen when i first read derek walcott, ‘the schooner flight,’ and convinced one of my teachers to let me give a lesson on the poem myself.  so i assigned the reading to the whole class, and i thought i could teach it like the novels we were reading then, like ‘catcher in the rye’ or ‘a separate piece.’  but everyone swore that walcott didn’t make any sense.  that was my first inkling that i was painting myself into a corner.  i listened to walcott on the radio when he read in santa fe at the lannan theater that summer.  my older brother was going to the college of santa fe, then, and i really hoped he would give me a ride up.  but, anyway, i listened on the radio in my bedroom.  the next year, i read philip levine.  i was asked to teach one of his poems in english class my senior year, and i did ‘rain downriver.’  that whole year i was obsessed with workers’ poems.  carl sandburg, james wright.  i was reading ‘civilization and its discontents,’ too.  and i thought of myself as a worker.

it’s hard to explain, but easy for me to wrap my brain around, this sort of development.  my parents split up when i was ten, and when we were thirteeen my mom moved us up into the sandias to work for room and board on a horse stables.  it was that or live on the streets at that point.  we would wake up before sunrise to water and feed the horses, and muck the stalls, and load the tractor with hay.  on weekends we would take out trail rides or clean brush or clean the arena where they did english riding.  i worked every waking hour, and i would go to school with shit six inches up my sleeves.  i got teased, but by then i was already proud.  when the socialist poets, and the workers’ poets, finally found their way to me, i was totally prepared to fall in love.  i was waiting tables at a diner through high school, graveyard shifts on the weekends, and reading, and writing, and sometimes making it to class.  i can’t imagine how they graduated me cum laude with a scholarship, with so many missed days.  but i managed.  so i brag.

the voice that is great within us changed my life, too, when i was in high school

those are a few of the first poets that mattered.  the list could go on. 

james stotts : part three

has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

it never stands still.  the more it expands, the later i feel i’ve come to the party.  maybe too late.  i can’t admit to the confidence in the current state of poetry that is advertised by poetry critics every time they get a chance to survey what we’re doing nowadays.  i don’t feel like we’re on any right track.  i asked mark strand once, not long before he passed, about what it means to be a poet in america today.  he wasn’t afraid—he was confident—that he didn’t have real readers in real numbers anymore, that they barely exist.  i don’t know if it’s a case of anymore, but it was nevertheless discouraging.

i think of russia as a time capsule, where it’s possible to see an analogy to the slow decline in concern here—accelerated.  the collapse of the soviet union also ended most of the literary censorship, or at least pushed the boundaries enough that a lot of underground poets were allowed to come up for air, and that a whole century of verboten verse came to light without consequence, so that russians could openly recover their modern heritage.  of course, pussy riot is still pushing the envelope, and they have a literary vocabulary, but they aren’t poets.  anyway, this ‘democracy’ came with a huge dystrophy of esteem generally for poetry.  sergei gandlevsky, when asked if it was better or worse, after the fall of the soviet union now that he can publish his work in his own country, shrugged and said it was ‘по-другому.’ just that things were ‘different’ now.  the persecution was gone, but nobody cares.  you can see this delineated clearly between generations in russia.  but the older generation was never comfortable reading tsvetaeva and mandelstam.  they love mayakovsky and esenin, though.  that would be like us being allowed to learn frost, but being told that t.s. eliott and langston hughes and allen ginsberg were subpar and anti-institutional.  and ¾ of our poetry would be in an underground.

what i see now here wherever i look is a compartmentalized identity poetry.  every poet in his camp, using the poetry to check off the newest box.  a lot of energy being wasted.  american poets get a lot of nosebleeds because they don’t have enough iron in their diet, i think.

just one more comparison, though, because i think american poetry deserves pride of place.  russian speakers will swear that pasternak’s translations of shakespeare are superior, just due to the natural poetic capability of the russian language.  i don’t consider it arrogant to state that the original is the wellspring, and proof of english’s weedy bastard capacity, and that it has outbastardized, in a good way, the field.

james stotts : part two

how did you first engage with poetry?

the old velvet volumes of mother goose rhymes and fairy tales, which took up half a book shelf in the den, and then the tiny little best loved poems that i think used to be in every house, even if there wasn’t a single other book of real literature.  it’s heartening and ironic to think that in every family, the greatest poems were at hand, often right by the bible, for whenever they were needed.  the first poems i remember are hot cross buns, and the walrus and the carpenter.  but i think even at five or six i was obsessed with every kind of book.  there were five kids, and we all acquired it to some degree.  even though we didn’t have money.  my mother would never throw away a good book, and we spent every weekend with her at the library, carrying home stacks of books, mostly for her, which she devoured. one of her biggest shames was when she would get her card suspended, and we’d have to go to the main library and pay overdue and lost fees.

i had already decided what i meant to do with my life when i was eight.

i was twelve when i bought my first books.  my class was taken on a field trip to a strip mall around the corner where a book liquidation mart had popped up.  we each took five dollars.  i got last year’s best american poetry, david wagoner, kenneth patchen, and stevie smith, and some trash novel, all for a dollar each.  i still have them all, except the last one.  at that point, though, i already had a lot of favorite poets, only these ones were really mine.

james stotts : part one

james stotts is a poet and russian translator, living in boston with his son.  his first two books, since and elgin pelicans, were published by pen and anvil press.

what are you working on?

it never occurs to me until after the fact.  the work goes on, and if the small pieces have any affinity in retrospect, then that just becomes a matter of flower arrangement.  i’ve hardly ever been capable of a project.  in fact, the poems have been getting shorter, tighter, more opaque, nearer to a certain end.  my marriage, which was a wonderful but overextended realization of mutual exclusion—fourteen years—gave me a lot of material.  three books.  the next one is looking like a break-up album, with the upshot of a housewarming.