In November of 2008 Tim Murphy asked Leslie Monsour to host a discussion on contemporary women’s poetry at Eratosphere’s Distinguished Guest forum. Guests included Rhina Espaillat, Alicia Stallings, Gail White, Suzanne Doyle, Susan McLean, Catherine Tufariello, Deborah Warren, and Julie Kane. Murphy kicked off the event with this interview with Leslie Monsour, six of whose poems appear elsewhere in this issue of The Chimaera. The entire Eratosphere discussion, including Monsour’s interviews with the aforementioned distinguished poets, can be perused here.
Murphy: Leslie, we have Burns in common, and a proclivity to sing at the drop of a hat. Of course you sing and play guitar far better than I do, the god of that having left me forty years ago. I have read The Alarming Beauty of the Sky many times. I find so many poems which are song-like, and I don’t find that to be the case with many of our contemporaries. Your thoughts on Burns and song?
Monsour: I think I began to sing as I learned to speak. This was probably my mother’s doing. She had a good voice, carried a tune well, and enjoyed bursting into song. I remember singing “Oh Susanna” and “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain” from my playpen. In kindergarten we were taught “Flow Gently Sweet Afton,” which I think is the first time I had the physical sensation of beauty from a melody. The song-like quality you hear in some of my poems must be an unconscious influence of that pleasure. I wouldn’t want to put any of my poems to music, however. I have written a few songs in the past, but found my musicianship too limited to do very much. I mean, I was actually a “singer/songwriter” and performed in Hollywood clubs. I thought, when I was a 20 year-old, that that’s what I might do. As it turned out, I didn’t have the stomach for show-biz. I had awful stage fright. (Not anymore). Here’s the chorus from a song I wrote in the early seventies: “Bring back a poem of the softest night/ Ask the dizzy cuckoo for a tune/ Be my lover, be my poet, bring me light/ Sing to me the secret of the moon.”
Writing song lyrics is an entirely different process from writing poems, in my opinion. Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter didn’t write poetry and never claimed to. They did write wonderful, enduring songs. On the other hand, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan have been called poets, and probably consider themselves such, but it’s their songs that matter. In Robbie Burns’s case, he kept his poems separate from his songs. His poems are never sung, to my knowledge, and his songs aren’t entirely his own. He took traditional folk airs and, for the most part, revised or restored lyrics that already existed. In a few cases, he set his own original lyrics to familiar folk melodies. Now there seem to be hundreds of songs attributed to Burns. As I understand it, the lasting importance of what he did was to collect, restore, revise, record, and preserve the traditional songs of Scotland, so that what was already there would not be left in fragments, and would never be lost. Now there is a collection of sixteen or so CD albums of the hundreds of songs that have been attributed to Burns. I’ve learned a few. My favorites are “Laddie, lie near me” (such yearning), “When rosie May comes in wi’ flow’res,” (the naughty gaird’ner wi’ his paidle), and most especially the beautiful autumn romance, “Now westlin’ winds,” which has some of the most gorgeous lyrics in English — or Scots, I should say. Burns probably wrote them himself. The song’s rich with bird-life — partridge, plover, woodcock, moorcock, hern, cushat, linnet. I don’t think Burns was much in favor of the hunters, Tim. He laments “the sportsman’s joy, the murdering cry, the fluttering, gory pinion.” Here’s one of the loveliest verses I’ve ever had the pleasure of singing: “But, Peggy, dear, the evening’s clear/Thick flies the skimming swallow./ The sky is blue, the field in view,/ All fading green and yellow./ Come, let us stray our gladsome way/ And view the charms of nature:/ The rustlin’ corn, the fruited thorn,/ And ev’ry happy creature.” Forgive me, but, the next verse is equally lovely: “We’ll gently walk, and sweetly talk/ Till the silent moon shines clearly./ I’ll clasp thy waist, and fondly prest,/ Swear how I love thee dearly./ Not vernal showers to budding flowers,/ Not autumn to the farmer,/ So dear can be as thou to me,/ My fair and lovely charmer.”
I guess the closest I’ve come to song in my poems might be “The Snail in the Marigold”: ‘Come, celebrate the appetite/No science can control,/ The wild, ingenious, slippery blight/ That incarnates the soul.’ Perhaps “Metamorphosis” is very song-like, too: ‘The hammock was a blue cocoon/ And I its seeing worm/ A fading tune, a crescent moon/ The threads about me, firm.’ But I have no wish to hear my poems put to music. Didn’t Frost say something about hoping no one would ever try to sing one of his poems? (Lewis Turco tells a hilarious story about the boys who worked as waiters at Breadloaf, who did a performance of “Stopping by Woods…” to the tune of “Fernando’s Hideaway.”) I dislike the “Art Songs” contemporary composers make from poems, and the way classically trained singers perform them. The compositions lack melody, and, like free verse, the timing is all over the place; the voices are so overpowering and the music so complex, the language is not only secondary, it is often unintelligible.
Murphy: I think my first interview here was with Alicia, and I made rather an ass of myself by asking why women had accounted for so few of the world’s great poets. She put me down firmly but gently, pointing out that the patriarchy kept you all barefoot and pregnant. Denied you higher education. It is pretty obvious to me years later that women now rival the men in formal poetry. You don’t yet have a Frost or Wilbur, but I see that time coming. What do you think, and where do you pin your hopes?
Monsour: Wow, Tim, that’s quite a question. We don’t have an Einstein or a Bohr yet, either. True, education kept women back for centuries, and that’s not the case anymore, so that excuse is out. There are subtle differences in the male and female ego that might put women at a disadvantage. Rhina Espaillat touches on this in the ironically entitled poem, “Workshop.” It opens with a question from “my old friend, the poet” (presumably male): “Where have you been?” Five stanzas later, after summarizing a woman’s cares and duties, the answer comes: “I’ve been putting a life together, like/ supper, like a poem, with what I have.” Her workshop, you see, has been her life. Meanwhile, last year, Penguin Classics published Alicia Stallings’s couplet translation of Lucretius’s The Nature of Things. It’s a tour de force. In “A Note on the Text and Translation,” Alicia writes, “I was surprised and delighted to learn, after I embarked on this project, that in all likelihood the first person to english the entire poem (in the 1640’s or 1650’s) was a woman, the memoirist Lucy Hutchinson. She had no previous translation to guide her, nor was her text in the same state we have it today, yet she rendered this difficult poem with admirable accuracy into lively rhyming couplets, in order ‘to understand things I heard so much discourse of at second hand.’ Her description of the circumstances under which she worked, with children underfoot and while she was engaged in domestic tasks, will ring a bell with many female scholars and poets.” So, as Stallings makes clear, even though we can attend Harvard now, some aspects of our lives remain unchanged, simply because we will always be women. I think we are every bit as dedicated to our art as men are, but we just don’t have the same support, and our lives are more entangled in practical necessity. In other words, the Pulitzers don’t come, and the laundry keeps piling up. But time will tell. Rhina Espaillat is about to have her sixth collection published, and A.E. Stallings, for all her accomplishments, is mighty young. There is a poet I’ve been wanting to mention who left us with some remarkable work, and that is the late Catherine Davis. I don’t know much about her, but her life fell apart in the most tragic way, and now her work can’t even be collected and published because of disputes about her so-called estate. Good ol’ Bob Barth put out a chapbook in 1998. Had she survived and had a more stable existence, there’s no telling… Here’s a villanelle that more than rivals Bishop’s famous one:
After A Time
After a time, all losses are the same.
One more thing lost is one thing less to lose;
And we go stripped at last the way we came.
Though we shall probe, time and again, our shame,
Who lack the wit to keep or to refuse,
After a time, all losses are the same.
No wit, no luck can beat a losing game;
Good fortune is a reassuring ruse:
And we go stripped at last the way we came.
Rage as we will for what we think to claim,
Nothing so much as this bare thought subdues:
After a time, all losses are the same.
The sense of treachery — the want, the blame —
Goes in the end, whether or not we choose,
And we go stripped at last the way we came.
So we, who would go raging, will go tame
When what we have we can no longer use;
After a time, all losses are the same;
And we go stripped at last the way we came.
Catherine Davis
Anyway, Tim, you’ve hit on what this topic is all about. My little opening essay will address
how the poetic talents of women might differ from men’s. AND…let’s see what the other ladies have to say, as well as all the members, when they join in.
Murphy: When my testicles descended my ear changed and I lost perfect pitch, decided to take on Yeats and Thomas at the tender age of seventeen. Here at the Sphere, promising poets have different trajectories, yours. Many came to the serious pursuit of poetry in their late forties or early fifties. Please share with us your thoughts on coming to poetry as an adult, rather than an adolescent.
Monsour: It’s okay. I’m not blushing about the descending testicles. I have two sons. Oh, gosh, I’m glad I wasn’t trying to publish poems in my adolescence and early adulthood. You know, in those immature, hot, blind years I thought honesty meant writing down the first thing that popped into my head. “Emotion recollected in tranquility” led to pure solipsism. Later in life, one discovers that the pleasure of one’s audience is more rewarding than the momentary thrill of spilling one’s guts onto the page. It’s just one of the many benefits of maturity. Tactfulness is another one. Lately, I’ve been having fun reading Middlemarch, and I came across something George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) put into the mouth of a young male protagonist, when he considers becoming a poet: “To be a poet is to have a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.” Ironically, the young woman he is addressing responds, “I understand what you mean about knowledge passing into feeling, for that seems to be just what I experience. But I am sure I could never produce a poem.” In other words, hogwash. No one should compose a poem who is in the delusional state of confusing knowledge and feeling, which pretty much sums up my young adulthood. By my forties, the process had been more or less de-mystified. Thankfully, it wasn’t a condition that came “by fits only.” I found out it was a matter of working at lines and refining them, word by word, with dictionary and thesaurus at arm’s reach. It was a disciplined, grown-up practice, and not a romantic binge, which was a great relief. Some poets have already reached this stage of maturity in their twenties, and I hate them. Have you seen the poems of Anne Marie Thompson in the current Dark Horse? She’s just starting.
Murphy: How close are you to a second collection?
Monsour: Well, if I wasn’t carrying on this illicit affair with the novel I’m apparently writing, I might be farther along. Right now, I could have a second collection, but only about a third of it would be any good. So, I guess I’m about one-third of the way, maybe half, into a second book. Ugh, what a dreary question, Tim. Poems take a lot of time to grow. I want to be sure they’re good and ripe before I add them to the salad.
Murphy: You are very close to a man who has been unfailingly kind and generous to me since the day I wrote him out of the blue, Timothy Steele. Tim has fostered, mentored you for a long time. Have you any reflections to make on that relationship, and are you returning his favors to younger poets? To whom?
Monsour: It’s impossible to say enough admiring, grateful, and affectionate words about Tim Steele. Currently, Tim and his wife, Vicki, live three canyons west of me, just south of Mulholland Drive, which runs along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains. Without a doubt, Tim is the most important poet in Southern California, and probably in all the Golden State. He knows the flora and fauna well, and has humanized and elevated this dreadful city with a number of the most thoughtfully profound, balanced, illuminating, technically masterful poems any town could ever wish for. To have him here in Los Angeles is an enormous blessing. Tim also writes about Vermont, where he grew up, and I think of him sometimes as a sort of reverse exposure of Robert Frost, since Frost began here, by the Pacific. However, except for writing great poetry, the comparison ends there.
I was extremely lucky to meet Tim in 1987, when he had the magnanimity to teach two classes at UCLA Extension. After taking his classes, a few fellow poets and I approached him, asking if he’d agree to come to our private workshop and help us with our work. Man, the guy said yes, and all he got for it was dinner. That way, an acquaintanceship ensued, which has developed into a good friendship over the years. Along the way, Tim has given me generous encouragement, advice, and great support. I trust the institution of Cal. State, L.A., where Tim has dedicated himself to teaching for the past two decades, is well aware of the treasure it has in its lap.
Tim is the sine qua non of contemporary formalism, in my opinion — though he says in all earnestness that the first new formalist was Geoffrey Chaucer. The two works of literary history and prosody Tim put out in the nineties, Missing Measures and All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, remain the crucial and enduring bookends of that decade, without which contemporary poetry would have simply toppled over before it got to the 21st century. I’ve tried to keep a few young poets honest here, in the classes I’ve taught at UCLA Extension and various community colleges and public schools in the Los Angeles area, as well as the mentoring programs I’ve been involved in myself. I unfailingly require, recommend, and refer to Tim’s work in everything I do pedagogically.
There seems to be an endless resistance to the study and practice of traditional versification, and especially out here in the wild, wild west, where the only tradition is to be either experimental or commercial. Going back east to the West Chester conference every year has been a real godsend, and I’ve always hit it off favorably with both of the directors — Mike Peich and Dana Gioia. For that reason I’ve been able to help a number of younger poets with scholarship recommendations. Lots of younger poets seek my advice on their manuscripts, and I can give it confidently because of my Steele foundation. One of the best things I’ve ever done is collaborate with Tim on a conference here at the Huntington Library a few years ago. I named the conference, “Otherwise We Fall into Prose” after a quote from Janet Lewis (from her essay in Annie Finch’s anthology, A Formal Feeling Comes), “We need meter. Otherwise we fall into prose”. Tim gave the keynote talk. It wouldn’t have been a poetry conference without him.
I want to stop and mention here to you, the other Tim, that your poems are frequently included in packets I hand out to students, that they may have a model of clean, knowledgeable accuracy of language; the beauty of sheer attention; and the charms of virtuoso versification. In fact, I must say how grateful I feel to you for giving me this time, which you’ve taken away from farming your own rugged, vital, successful and vast acreage of poems. Thank you, good Sir Tim.
Murphy: Leslie, thank you for these thoughtful responses, though I must blush at your concluding remark. I particularly thank you for quoting Catherine Davis’ great villanelle. The problem of the estate? Let God sort it out, and let us thank Suzanne Doyle, Helen Pinkerton, Bob Barth, and others who have worked so hard to keep her memory alive.
I have never sung ‘Now westlin’ winds’ to any audience but myself, because I simply burst into tears. I believe that Burns wasn’t yet twenty he wrote it, and it is so full of sorrow and wisdom. Yes, I hate it too when post-adolescents brim over with the genius that eludes us their seniors. As I have said, (and keep having to adjust the numeral, grace a Dieu), when Keats was my age, he’d been dead for 32 years!
This issue includes six poems by Leslie Monsour.
