20 Questions with MERIWETHER CLARKE
1. Hey Meriwether, which foreign language poet do you most wish you could read in the original?
Ahhh, this is tough. Rilke, though, always. And Akhmatova.
*** ** ***
2. Hey Meriwether, how has the election of Trump affected your work?
In every way. Silence that I used to think was an option is absolutely no longer optional. On a personal note, my wildly oscillating moods (more so than before) have also given me a new relationship to writing. Some weeks I have so much to get out of my head and onto the page there isn’t enough time in the day. Others, I read the news and truly just feel a kind of emptiness that makes the introspection and complete concentration that writing necessitates impossible.
I’ve also thought a lot this past year and-a-half (not just since the election but since Trump’s rise to candidacy) about what Trump’s popularity says about how much our culture values (or doesn’t value) language. After the access Hollywood tape came out, Trump famously said “it’s just words.” He traffics in falsehoods so flagrantly I imagine you would have to have some disconnect to what words literally mean (as well as whole phrases) in order think he deserves any credibility, as a human or a politician. So often hearing him speak is disorienting, not just because his viewpoints offend me to my core, but because he is literally incomprehensible. It worries and frightens me that he is able to sound this way and still be loved by his base (much less act the way he acts). That tells me something frightening about the way American society has learned to devalue language and underestimate its abilities to manipulate emotions, movements, and worldviews.
*** ** ***
3. Hey Meriwether, got a favorite famous poet anecdote?
My undergrad teacher and mentor, Mary Kinzie, told our Poetry workshop she had a Professor who studied with Auden when he was a visiting poet at a boarding school somewhere in New England. According to Mary’s teacher, during bleak winter nights Auden would lie in bed and, somehow, place the rug and paintings that decorated his room on top of him in an effort to create as much pressure and warmth. Not just because it was cold out, but because he liked the feeling of being cocooned. I have no idea how true this is, though I can firmly say Mary is not one to traffic in gossip or lies!
*** ** ***
4. Hey Meriwether, where’s your ideal place to write? Care to share a photo?
I prefer to write lying on the ground, ideally near a quiet window I can stare out of. My favorite place is the rug in my bedroom (pictured below). I lie there facing the sliding doors that lead out to a small deck, often with the door open.
I’m not sure exactly why this position appeals to me so much. I find it comfortable and less restrictive than sitting in a chair (though I know many don’t). I also find something comforting in being able to pause when I need to (which is often) and focus my attention on something minuscule like a pile of leaves or the succulent outside I need to water. I absolutely can’t write when people are talking and, in most cases, when other people are even in the room. So I suppose looking out the window affords me some feeling of connection to something beyond myself without the danger of being distracted by it.
*** ** ***
5. Hey Meriwether, what’s the last great poetry book you read?
I just finished Erika L. Sánchez’ Lessons on Expulsion and found it entirely astounding! Sánchez’ willingness to center her poems around the origins of familial, cultural, and political misogyny, and her speaker’s experiences of it, erupts from the page with moments of electric insight and shattering resolve. There is such tenderness to her use of language too, such beauty and such terror and such great humanity. It was one of those books I finished in one sitting and immediately had to begin again.
*** ** ***
6. Hey Meriwether, got a favorite quote about poetry?
I do! It comes from the Introduction to Mary Kinzie’s A Poet’s Guide to Poetry. This was the first poetry text written by a living poet I ever encountered, while a sophomore in college. The quote is in the second paragraph of the intro. It follows a paragraph of several sentences discussing the great “appetite for paraphrase” many readers have.
“I would like to counter the claims of culture and paraphrase by pointing to the call of a more impersonal task— that of overhearing music that is not yet made. All poetry comes into being in respect to its sounds, tormented into perfection or near-perfection by the logical and prosaic resistance of language in response to the disturbance of occasion.”
When I first cracked open A Poet’s Guide nearly everything in it intimidated me, with the exception of the above sentences. I distinctly remember something in me clicking— I suddenly understood why poems were special and why there was a very true, very precious reason to write them. Reading these words always brings me back to that moment when, for the first time in my life, the necessity of poetry made sense.
*** ** ***
7. Hey Meriwether, what’s something poetic about Los Angeles?
Los Angeles is a city of contradictions— endless money, but unbelievable economic inequality; beautiful nature, but immense pollution; infinite roads and highways, but constant traffic. Of course much of its economy is also based on an industry that often sells itself as being about artistic expression while still placing profit above all else, glorifying problematic tropes, and fueling our culture’s obsession with physical beauty and violence. Each of these things make it the perfect starting off point for trying to make sense of a world that is incomprehensible. For me, this is so often what returns me to the page— to try to think through what doesn’t make sense—emotionally, intellectually, politically, etc. (an impossible task, really).
On a lighter note, being constantly stuck in traffic also affords me the opportunity to mull over thoughts and ideas rattling around in my brain. These musings can, on rare occasion, plant the seed of a new poem.
*** ** ***
8. Hey Meriwether, could you tell us about the first poem you wrote?
I was 15 and on a road trip through New Mexico with my father and sister. We were on the way to Taos, a town my father wanted to visit in order to write, himself, and to show it to my sister and me. We were somewhere in the mountains (I wish I could tell you the name of the range) and I remember looking out the window at the trees blurring past us. It began to rain, but it was still sunny out, and that surprised me, things like never happened where I lived in Southern California. I started to think about missing home and about the fight my father and I had on my fifteenth birthday several days before. I was annoyed at him, in that moment, but now I only felt affection and love toward him and my sister. But there was still a tinge of sadness that struck me: the silence in the car, the lovely untouchable-ness of nature. In this most pastoral and angsty of moments (perhaps what Kinzie would describe as “the disturbance of occasion”, the beginnings of a poem sprouted in my mind and I scribbled it on an unlined spiral notebook I had stuffed in my purse.
The most interesting part is that I wouldn’t really admit to myself it was a poem. I was a very serious classical musician as a kid and I felt like I had no choice but to want a career in music. I remember going to our hotel room that night and opening my notebook again to read what I had written and trying to convince myself it was lyrics to a song, not a poem (though of course it was).
*** ** ***
9. Hey Meriwether, what’s the best piece of writing advice you ever got?
It never gets easy.
*** ** ***
10. Hey Meriwether, do you have a website/Youtube channel/Tumblr/ or the like?
I have a very bare bones website— meriwetherclarke.com.
*** ** ***
11. Hey Meriwether, what obsesses you?
Ah so many things. Hands, trees, eavesdropping, bodies of water, the insides of people’s houses, birds, musical instruments, what people do when they’re alone, other people’s to-do lists, bad reality shows, period dramas (novels, mini-series, and films), abandoned towns, windows (looking in them and out them)…As I’m typing these I’m realizing I sound like a voyeur! Which is, partially, accurate. I am unapologetically curious about human behavior (some may say snoopy, e.g. my sister).
*** ** ***
12. Hey Meriwether, is there anything you consciously avoid when writing a poem?
Holding on to moments and lines that don’t serve the poem.
I remember first having an understanding of what this concept meant in an undergrad fiction class. Brian Bouldrey, my Professor at the time, told us about Faulkner’s famous “kill your darlings” line. It wasn’t until later that I realized this could be applied to poems as well (and should be!). In almost every case when I’m working on a poem I know has potential but can’t figure out how to push it forward, if I step away and rethink the choices I’ve made I can pinpoint the line where it begins to go awry. In almost every case, if I erase that line and re-write starting from that place on, the poem become much better (or, at least, revisable). It’s moments like this when you realize you have less control of what’s on the page than you imagine.
*** ** ***
13. Hey Meriwether, what do you think: Are poets made or born?
Both, I think. I don’t know if I ever would have been a poet had I not had a teacher who told me to write poetry. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I thought the only way to do that was to write fiction since that was all I had really been taught to appreciate. The social and economic privilege I was born into had a role in allowing this to happen. I found myself at a competitive private university with a great undergraduate writing program entirely by accident. I had gone there for the music school but realized, after a single quarter, I had no interest in being a performer at all. In fact, the thought of it made me quite miserable.
That being said, there are obvious natural talents, inclinations, and interests that I would imagine most good poets have in common: an obsessive need to read everything, an inquisitive nature, an instinct for exploring the boundaries of language, a capacity to investigate the dark underbelly of human experiences, and more. I think you could make the argument that, at their core, these are things one is born with (though, of course, they can be developed differently).
*** ** ***
14. Hey Meriwether, if all your poems were suddenly commercials what would they be selling?
A world where women are listened to more, by men and by other women. It’s not that my poems directly advertise this potential, gynocratic utopia, but they often come from a place of feeling women’s experiences, thoughts, and histories go so easily and happily unheard. In my poems, this sometimes has to do with the physical experiences of women and sometimes has to do with what lingers beneath the surface— the shame, the guilt, the confusion, the anger, the resignation.
*** ** ***
15. Hey Meriwether, any thoughts about the role that effort plays in your composition process?
For me, concentrated effort to write a poem isn’t always present at the moment of a poem’s initial conception, but almost everything afterward comes down to it. We live in a culture that, when it bothers to engage with art, frequently glamorizes the creation of it. To be an artist is to live freely, question the world, get drunk all the time, have affairs! Some of these may be true some of the time, but, at its core, making art involves a great deal of sitting in a room by yourself and failing again and again and again. Getting back up the next day and trying once more necessitates, of course, an immense and specific type of effort.
*** ** ***
16. Hey Meriwether, do you think poetry has any enemies?
I really do! As trite as it sounds, I think the enemies of poetry are the enemies of all that is good in this world— the unthinking, the cowardly, the fearful, the selfish, the unkind, the unfeeling, the un-curious, the willfully ignorant (all qualities of which poets, like all humans, can be guilty of)…the list goes on. Of course many of us are these things at some point or some of these things always. But that’s what I think is so extraordinary about poetry— it teaches its readers to not only look at language in a new way, but also human experience. There is, as Thomas Lux says, “something about the right combination of metaphor or image connected to the business of being alive that only poems can do.”
*** ** ***
17. Hey Meriwether, what misperception might someone have of you if they only knew your poems?
They would surely think I am rather humorless. Which is untrue, but a fair judgement based on my writing. In truth I, like one of my earliest heroes Elizabeth Bennet, “dearly love to laugh.” I imagine they would also think I’ve had particular literal, physical experiences I haven’t had. This confusion of the speaker with the author happens to all writers, perhaps poets most of all. Though I have noticed over the past six years of teaching that readers (or, at least, my students) tend to assume female authors are autobiographical more so than men.
*** ** ***
18. Hey Meriwether, where’s the most “poetic” place you’ve ever visited?
Macchu Picchu. It was/is poetic in the sense that it makes you rethink everything you ever thought was true about what humans are capable of. It is also the most “sublime” place, in the Wordsworthian sense of the word, I have ever visited. Standing there, one gets a sense of the desperate fragility of human civilizations and the immense power of them, of the beauty of nature, but also the terrifying vastness of it (the latter part of that is, perhaps, also a result of the very, very steep bus-ride one has to take to get to the top of the mountain, unless you hike).
*** ** ***
19. Hey Meriwether, do you have any other writers on your family tree?
My father is a folk musician/songwriter. His songs are very poetic. His father was a journalist, music critic, and culture editor in New York City and Boston during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. He also wrote an obscure novel called Virtue Ok’d. It’s currently out of print but I was given a copy by my dad that he found on the internet.
Way, way back when, also on my father’s side, is a John Henry Clarke who was a minister and wrote Rhode Island’s first state charter in 1663, considered by historians to be this country’s first document proclaiming religious freedom.
Image: Rhode Island Royal Charter, detail
*** ** ***
20. Hey Meriwether, any non-poets (novelists, actors, politicians, family members, et cetera) you wish would write poems?
I wish everyone would write poems! Truly, I think the act of reading and engaging with poetry (with, perhaps, the ultimate goal of writing poetry) is an act of revolutionary exploration that benefits all who take part in it. That being said, I suppose the definition of what a poem is would change in unknown ways if everyone became a poet. So perhaps I’ll edit my answer to something slightly more exclusive and ambiguous: everyone I love.
*** ** ***
[This Q&A was conducted in October 2017 and first published, via Facebook and Twitter, in November 2017]
A Dozen Nothing 