You are originally from New Haven, Connecticut. What drew you to settle in Keene and the Adirondacks? Do you do much hiking or mountain climbing?

I went to school in New Haven until I was fourteen, but we spent summers, vacations, and many weekends in the Adirondacks of upstate New York. My father was a high school teacher, so he worked on an academic schedule. The time spent in the last significant wilderness east of the Rockies was the single most profound influence on my life and work. Twenty-five years ago, my husband and I bought a house there, and it’s been our full or half-time home ever since. I do more hiking than climbing these days but spend much of my time in the woods, which endlessly fascinate me and where I feel most at home in the world.

Do you agree with some poets that poetry concerns the subconscious and delves deeper than the conscious mind?

Each poem has to
bring back something previously unknown or unarticulated. That’s why an ‘idea’ for a poem rarely results in the kind of surprise we hope for: a discovery or sudden insight that seems to come from somewhere outside or beyond us.

Poetry lives on the frontier between the two. I think of the painter Paul Klee saying, “If I paint what I know, I bore myself. If I paint what you know, I bore you. Therefore I paint what I don’t know.” Each poem has to bring back something previously unknown or unarticulated. That’s why an “idea” for a poem rarely results in the kind of surprise we hope for: a discovery or sudden insight that seems to come from somewhere outside or beyond us. When a poet merely expresses emotion or follows logic to a conclusion, or describes something, however beautifully or dramatically or precisely, what does he learn? That’s just craft. But when a poet is willing to risk not-knowing, that’s when something might happen. I think this is what Mandelshtam meant when he said that the poem should be an event on the page.

You have stated that you are interested in writing “little poems that are acute glimpses of things.” Are there poets who write this type of intensely concise poem you admire? Could you say that this type of poem is reminiscent of haiku though without that form’s traditional constraints?

I seem to be going through a sort of minimalist phase, and for several years have been reading mostly ancient Chinese and Japanese work: Han Shan, Du Fu, Ryokan, Basho, Issa, Wang Wei, Su T’ung Po, Buson, etc. and lots of anonymous work by monks and Zen teachers. I’m less interested in them formally than I am in their delicacy of perception, head-on frontality, and lack of decoration. Because Japanese, for example, is a language in which we hear pitch and intonation rather than stress, as in English, counting syllables in English makes no sense to my ear. When there’s no stress, we hear the syllable count. When there is, we hear beats. My first introduction to short vivid takes on human consciousness was the early work of Merwin, Bly, Snyder, James Wright, some of Levertov, and Creeley. Among contemporary poets, I particularly admire Joseph Stroud for his purely American take on the qualities I mentioned above; though many of his poems are longer, they have about them a lucidity and directness that I find powerful. Also, he never shows off!

A Zen practitioner for many years, you’ve been quoted as saying “Zen goes where language can’t go,” which brings to mind a wonderful poem from your latest book, Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been, “How Zen Ruins Poets.” Could you expand on this statement and on the poem? Is it possible to further describe how perception functions beyond language?

I’ve long been interested in the way poetry can seem to inhabit the spaces between words, how its resonance and meaning sometimes come through almost in spite of words. Poetry that doesn’t verge on the unsayable plays for stakes too low to be exciting, let alone dangerous. As I get older, I feel increasing urgency about keeping my attention on the most important things, and increasing impatience with poems that don’t yet know that we’re going to die. Zen is said to be a “mind-to-mind transmission.” The best poems are exactly that: they leap from one mind to another without stopping to explain exactly how they did it. Poetry cannot be paraphrased because it can’t be apprehended by a purely literal mind. I think this is why so many people are afraid of it, or think they dislike it. In our culture, out of necessity, we’re used to living in a mostly-literal mind, and poetry demands that we enter it with another kind of mind. I believe we all have this other mind, but that it atrophies if nothing stimulates or calls upon it on a regular basis. “How Zen Ruins Poets” attempts to sneak up on that realization.

In an earlier interview, you said “Poetry goes where prose can’t go.” Some would say that prose simply takes the longer way. What does poetry do in terms of creative expression that prose can’t?

I believe that poetry asks us to enter a mind unlike the one in which we mostly live our lives. This mind is closer to painting than it is to prose. Talking to painters is fascinating to me because I find they encounter the same kinds of problems and questions that I do in poems. Poetry lives in the connotations of words as much as it does in the denotations, whereas prose, even “poetic” prose, tends to have a more intellectually coherent and linear under-organization. Poems can go sideways and backwards, which to me is like looking at something in 3-D rather than 2-D.

Should poetry strictly stick to the truth? In other words, is it okay for a poet to fictionalize her or his work (as a fiction writer does)?

It’s odd to me that people assume that the speaker in a poem is the poet, but assume, in a story or novel, that the ‘I’ is a fictional character. That’s probably because of the common misconception that poetry is an expression of “feelings” that are “personal;” that is, specifically and identifiably individual. To me, the speaker in a poem can be a stand-in for the poet or a voice from outer space, or anything in between. The voice has to identify itself; that’s part of the work of the poem. Who’s speaking? To whom does he or she (or it) speak? Besides, how well do you trust your memory? Anyone who’s ever kept an honest journal knows that we misremember things all the time, and vividly, with certainty! So of course poets “lie.” If they don’t, they’re locked in a tiny playpen. If you have an epiphany about something while washing dishes, does the poem that explores it have to be set in a kitchen?

In the poem, “Monastery Nights” one of many great pieces from the 2005 collection Dog Language, you write about the self and wanting to know “what I was.” How would you define the self at this point?

For me, it’s the Big Question. I know “who” I am the way anyone does: I’m an aggregate of history, memory, sense perception, emotion, etc. But if you pick those things apart, what holds them together? Nothing! I’ve come to see, primarily through my study of Zen, that what I have always considered to be my “self” is in fact a phantom, an illusion created and maintained by me, which keeps me from realizing my true nature, which is (and I’m going out on a long limb here) pure consciousness of the interdependency of all things, just as they are. We’re all in this together, and every time I perceive myself as separate, I blind myself.

In your work there is immediacy, clarity and unflinching honesty, as in the poem “Road Tar” from The Snow Watcher (1998) in which you write about a squirrel on a road trying to free itself from its crushed hindquarters, an excruciatingly alive image. This is a poem in which the imagery and context painfully speak for themselves and the speaker takes a back seat. Is this kind of poem more challenging to write than one in which there is a more direct rendering of the narrator/self?

That poem is interested in the way things get memorialized. Specifically, how the visual memory of a run-over squirrel is forever linked with the taste of road tar, which, for those who haven’t read the poem, the speaker remembers tasting because a kid said you could chew it like gum. The poem brings together two things that in “real life” had no relation (were made up details, or happened at different times in different places) but the mind joins them. Why? The poem asks, Is this how “[a] girl with a burned tongue was conceived” ?

When Practice of Poetry was released in 1992 and became a bestseller, were you and co-author Robin Behn surprised by its success?

We knew there was a need for it. Teachers are always sharing exercises, and there was no central source. Also, new teachers of creative writing had very limited texts from which to work. There were plenty (Western Wind by John Frederick Nims being my favorite) of excellent how-to-read-poetry books, but not much on the subject of the nuts and bolts of how poems are actually made. We never intended the book to have such a long life, though. We saw it as a springboard from which teachers would evolve their own variations. Good exercises mutate and adapt themselves to a constantly-changing audience.