Joel Chace
Possibilities: An Interview with Ruth Lepson
Joel Chace: Near the beginning of this exchange, you wrote, “If you can’t see yourself in a mirror or people aren’t looking at you, who are you? I’m getting some acclaim for this book in a deeper way than with my other books, and this book is really solid, I think, and substantial, so now I begin to hear a poet in me. Besides, it takes a long time to learn.. If you play the violin or sax, you know whether or not you’re learning. What is a poet, anyway? Since we use words, anyone can write something.” As self-effacing as these thoughts are, I find them also marvelously insightful in terms of what they suggest about the long arc of any artist’s life work.
Your new collection, on the way: new and selected poems, contains poetry that spans over four decades. One of the many things that I find remarkable about the book — and here I’m definitely pushing against your self-effacement — is the consistent high quality of the work. The earliest pieces are very strong — confident, canny, and full of surprises. A good example is "Ambivalence." You told me that Ben Mazer, who selected the poems and wrote a fine introduction, commented that your book "is about openness to life and to friendship." Certainly that is a true statement. However, in "Ambivalence" and many other poems, you address the subjects of loss and grief. Could you talk about this as applied to "Ambivalence," and — in particular — that stunning last line?
Ruth Lepson: You got the gist of it — my life and my work, that is. It’s true what Ben says but sometimes as most people have I have been hurt. “Like taking off a tight dress that I love,” you know you don’t want to take it off bc you look good in it, also it’s hard to take it off, but then it hems (pun intended) you in and you need to take it off.
JC: How about those two intriguing lines, "The first layer of beige on your canvas/seeped through the rooms"?
RL: The person about whom it’s written was a painter.
JC: "Barricades," also in "Dreaming in Color," concludes with these lines—
The word "possibility," which is repeated here, strikes me as a potential key to an understanding of this poem and even to your larger body of work. Would you comment on this observation and elaborate on its implications?
RL: Yes, you’re reading carefully — I didn’t want to make a grand statement about major change or definite change, which is why “possibility,” a hopeful but not definite word is there. Let me say that the poems seem to some people to be more muted than I myself hear them as being. “Barricades” demonstrates the difficulty of changing. There is always hope, there is always hard work, but these are no guarantee that your life will improve. Then again, when you have the gumption to jump over the next barricade, a new element or part of life enters you, or you enter it.
In “Ambivalence,” and other poems, you are quite right, there is someone I love but someone it isn’t possible for me to continue living with, so, taking off the tight dress that I love.
JC: Dreaming in Color, 1980. Then the second section of your new book, Morphology, 2007. In this latter sequence, you are writing relatively brief, mysterious prose poems. We'll look at a couple of examples of those, but I'm hoping that you can do some tracing of the process, over the better part of three decades, that led to Morphology.
RL: Morphology evolved because when I lived in Ohio in the late 70’s I started recording my dreams, and when back in Boston I continued for a while. Most dreams are boring to read—though there’s the occasional fascinating one — so when I decided to make some of my dreams into prose poems I wanted only very brief passages, including some morphing. Some funny, some dark, some looking at language. In the new book it’s not specified that these are dream prose poems. There are maybe 80 of my photographs in the original, 2007 book, plus photographs by professional photographer Rusty Crump. The idea of including my photographs was to show how the waking life and the dream life are related. And they are. How—that’s up to the reader.
JC: As a reader and as a writer, I completely agree with your observations regarding the relationships among dreaming, poetry, and life. Who knows how many times poets have awakened from vivid dreams that they record and feel are clearly significant and deep, only to discover that the written records/poems are terrible, worthless as works of art. On the other hand, some marvelous poems have been triggered by dreams. From my perspective, the prose “dream records” have been carefully, wisely selected. Here are two poems that I feel are remarkably descriptive but that also move to more profound levels beyond “reportage.” Do you concur with this view, and would you comment on what you recall about the composition of these pieces?
RL: I think those are evocative, yes.
The similes in the poem just appeared — I do remember well I could see the scroll and the sunset. Though I’m not a surrealist, the way things become other things — in dreams, of course, there’s that same transformation.
“Nights of aquamarine and indigo” — that’s at the heart of the poems, the colors, the darkness. Maybe one of us is indigo and one of us is aquamarine, I don’t know. Or they are parts of myself. I think there’s something about facing realistically what was going on between us, and how overwhelmed we felt.
JC: Following Morphology is the section/collection entitled I Went Looking For You. Many of these poems are marked by such clarity, such precision of imagery. And the Atlantic Ocean, its elements, and colors — in particular white and gray. I wonder if you agree with these characterizations, and how they apply to the following three pieces?
RL: Interesting that you chose those poems. They are ones I too like a lot in part because they’re simple and small and straightforward. That book was never to see the light of day. I had lost the MS but a friend came across her copy & wrote that I should publish it. I thought many of the poems were too detailed & too personal, but thanks to Celia Gilbert’s insistence the book was soon published. White & gray I realize appears in the seagull one but I hadn’t thought about using white & gray several times in the book. Thanks for pointing that out. I loved Swampscott at one point in my life, then Gloucester became important, primarily because poet and occultist Gerrit Lansing was such a draw and of course Charles Olson put it on the map with The Maximus Poems.
JC: In his “Introductory Note” to your book, Ben Mazer offers this: “Near the end of his life, Bill Berkson read ask anyone and began writing Ruth a series of letters expressing his keen admiration: ‘I have this theory that every poet, including me, wants to write like the proverbial ‘ancient Chinese’ one on a mountain top; to write clearly, whether passionate or wise or both (can one be both?), to simply tell. Well, you’re a model of that.’”
Mazer’s words remind me of a response, as part of an interview interestingly enough, that Louis Zukofsky made: “I’d say the business of writing is to see as much as you can, to hear as much as you can, and if you think at all to think without clutter; then as you put the things together, try to be concise.”
I feel that the untitled poem below, from the collection’s penultimate section, is a perfect illustration of both Berkson’s and Zukofsky’s views. What do you think, Ruth?
RL: That’s my favorite poem in ask anyone, Joel; I’m so gratified that you chose it. You and I are likeminded: ultimately we seem to be taken by the simpler poems. Great quotation from Zukofsky. I stole the last line from a Creeley poem (though I don’t know which one). Sometimes I think someday I’ll write like Creeley but that’s ridiculous — only Creeley can write like Creeley. Anyway, he is always dealing with the form with his superb ear. But I do like the simplicity of the poem. People respond to it, it seems. I must have driven along the Charles a thousand times, and certain things often caught my eye and they appear here, for me the essentials of my drive home from work.
JC: The newest poems in your collection, the pieces that comprise the final section, on the way, seem to indicate a willingness on your part to stretch out, to expand your poetic forms. In the interest of saving space, I won’t quote any of those texts here. However, I want to ask if I’m at all accurate in making the previous assumption. And, finally, I must say that I’m particularly taken by the two long poems that focus on artists, “Calling All Cats” (for Cecil Taylor) and “Portrait of Cy Twombly.” I invite any remarks you may like to make about what drew you to these people and how their artistic endeavors are reflected in the two poems.
RL: Yes, it was time to go beyond my life and environs, especially because I’m trying to write some eco poetry. But these two are occasional poems. The Cy Twombly was written on the occasion of the Black Mountain College show at the ICA in Boston. Several of us were asked to choose a work of art, write a poem in relation to it, and give a reading of it in front of the work. I walked around the show a few times & Fielding Dawson’s portrait of Cy Twombly is the one I kept being drawn to. I wrote some of it while looking at the portrait, some from home on the computer. “Calling all Cats” was written for the 50th anniversary of jazz at the New England Conservatory, and read by me on the Cecil Taylor night. Cecil Taylor went to NEC and once I heard him play in Jordan and was excited by the energy and variety of his playing, in person. Also he writes wild poetry. I found myself reading some books on Twombly after the fact & got absorbed in his combination of words and images, his subtlety, his allusions, and his various long-term projects.
Joel Chace has published work in print and electronic magazines such as Tip of the Knife, Eratio, Otoliths, Word For/Word, and Golden Handcuffs Review. Most recent collections include Humors, from Paloma Press, Threnodies, from Moria Books, and fata morgana, from Unlikely Books.
Possibilities: An Interview with Ruth Lepson
Joel Chace: Near the beginning of this exchange, you wrote, “If you can’t see yourself in a mirror or people aren’t looking at you, who are you? I’m getting some acclaim for this book in a deeper way than with my other books, and this book is really solid, I think, and substantial, so now I begin to hear a poet in me. Besides, it takes a long time to learn.. If you play the violin or sax, you know whether or not you’re learning. What is a poet, anyway? Since we use words, anyone can write something.” As self-effacing as these thoughts are, I find them also marvelously insightful in terms of what they suggest about the long arc of any artist’s life work.
Your new collection, on the way: new and selected poems, contains poetry that spans over four decades. One of the many things that I find remarkable about the book — and here I’m definitely pushing against your self-effacement — is the consistent high quality of the work. The earliest pieces are very strong — confident, canny, and full of surprises. A good example is "Ambivalence." You told me that Ben Mazer, who selected the poems and wrote a fine introduction, commented that your book "is about openness to life and to friendship." Certainly that is a true statement. However, in "Ambivalence" and many other poems, you address the subjects of loss and grief. Could you talk about this as applied to "Ambivalence," and — in particular — that stunning last line?
AMBIVALENCE
The rooms can breathe now that you’ve left.
The ocean, big O, fills the hall and my fuzzy head.
Tired of adjectives and nouns,
now I have a chance for verbs.
Now I have a chance to take walks.
The first layer of beige on your canvas
seeped through the rooms.
Now I’ll remember myself, again.
Your angular self, tilting around the hall,
like a piece of paper —
what is it doing in big rooms on a new street?
Do you see how hard you are to talk to?
You’re like a chip of granite
that, when I saw it,
made me feel warm.
I won’t know what you’re eating for dinner.
You won’t know if I’m still hanging around.
I’ll be listening to sounds more carefully.
This is like taking off a tight dress that I love.
Ruth Lepson: You got the gist of it — my life and my work, that is. It’s true what Ben says but sometimes as most people have I have been hurt. “Like taking off a tight dress that I love,” you know you don’t want to take it off bc you look good in it, also it’s hard to take it off, but then it hems (pun intended) you in and you need to take it off.
JC: How about those two intriguing lines, "The first layer of beige on your canvas/seeped through the rooms"?
RL: The person about whom it’s written was a painter.
JC: "Barricades," also in "Dreaming in Color," concludes with these lines—
…In back of the pleasing barricade
lies the warmth of pain, a barricade of
panic behind that, filtering the world.
And behind panic comes momentary peace.
The possibility of developing.
But the effort is always
difficult to the same degree.
You move away yet you turn toward it.
The tune this time is not yet audible,
not yet clear. The time, the tune,
the kind change with change, but the effort,
the effort always contains
the same degree of possibility.
The word "possibility," which is repeated here, strikes me as a potential key to an understanding of this poem and even to your larger body of work. Would you comment on this observation and elaborate on its implications?
RL: Yes, you’re reading carefully — I didn’t want to make a grand statement about major change or definite change, which is why “possibility,” a hopeful but not definite word is there. Let me say that the poems seem to some people to be more muted than I myself hear them as being. “Barricades” demonstrates the difficulty of changing. There is always hope, there is always hard work, but these are no guarantee that your life will improve. Then again, when you have the gumption to jump over the next barricade, a new element or part of life enters you, or you enter it.
In “Ambivalence,” and other poems, you are quite right, there is someone I love but someone it isn’t possible for me to continue living with, so, taking off the tight dress that I love.
JC: Dreaming in Color, 1980. Then the second section of your new book, Morphology, 2007. In this latter sequence, you are writing relatively brief, mysterious prose poems. We'll look at a couple of examples of those, but I'm hoping that you can do some tracing of the process, over the better part of three decades, that led to Morphology.
RL: Morphology evolved because when I lived in Ohio in the late 70’s I started recording my dreams, and when back in Boston I continued for a while. Most dreams are boring to read—though there’s the occasional fascinating one — so when I decided to make some of my dreams into prose poems I wanted only very brief passages, including some morphing. Some funny, some dark, some looking at language. In the new book it’s not specified that these are dream prose poems. There are maybe 80 of my photographs in the original, 2007 book, plus photographs by professional photographer Rusty Crump. The idea of including my photographs was to show how the waking life and the dream life are related. And they are. How—that’s up to the reader.
JC: As a reader and as a writer, I completely agree with your observations regarding the relationships among dreaming, poetry, and life. Who knows how many times poets have awakened from vivid dreams that they record and feel are clearly significant and deep, only to discover that the written records/poems are terrible, worthless as works of art. On the other hand, some marvelous poems have been triggered by dreams. From my perspective, the prose “dream records” have been carefully, wisely selected. Here are two poems that I feel are remarkably descriptive but that also move to more profound levels beyond “reportage.” Do you concur with this view, and would you comment on what you recall about the composition of these pieces?
“The snow turns musical like the scroll on a player piano and you and I dance the cha-cha in the street. The telephone poles are lacquered, the traffic light sort of covered—lime green, gold, and cherry red—like little sunsets in my head. You are dreaming softly and it doesn’t really matter that the wind is veering off, sideways, the blizzard quieted. The bridge is like some shoulders, the river like the sea.”
“I’ve come up to the deck and want to bury the sea wall and look for a long time. He’s coming up, too. The wind makes him shiver. His darkness is nearly the same shade as mine. We walk to the rail together, afraid of those whales of waves, though we stay on deck until the grey dissipates. Nights of aquamarine and indigo, somber turning of the boat on the horizon.”
RL: I think those are evocative, yes.
The similes in the poem just appeared — I do remember well I could see the scroll and the sunset. Though I’m not a surrealist, the way things become other things — in dreams, of course, there’s that same transformation.
“Nights of aquamarine and indigo” — that’s at the heart of the poems, the colors, the darkness. Maybe one of us is indigo and one of us is aquamarine, I don’t know. Or they are parts of myself. I think there’s something about facing realistically what was going on between us, and how overwhelmed we felt.
JC: Following Morphology is the section/collection entitled I Went Looking For You. Many of these poems are marked by such clarity, such precision of imagery. And the Atlantic Ocean, its elements, and colors — in particular white and gray. I wonder if you agree with these characterizations, and how they apply to the following three pieces?
WHERE SEAGULLS FLY
It’s good to walk the dog
when he finally meets
the black cat down the street.
Years, each tiny lesson.
The way seagulls seem to fly at times
against the wind and into the clouds.
It’s a white day, white and gray.
It’s good to live where seagulls fly,
thick clouds over the gray house.
Spring wind, first night on the porch,
dandelions white,
close to the end of something.
SWAMPSCOTT HOUR
Seagulls spread out in a line by the water’s edge,
a string of lights unraveling.
Ducks, dark as darkest rocks, form a circle in the sea.
On the drive home, sun huge,
its reflection white gold on telephone wires —
something turning into something new.
Cool wind —
something old.
Black birds fly.
Black stars in a white sky.
FIX
My moon-stained mind won’t fix
on last night’s lemon and blue-clay sky
since in the night you came by.
I dreamt I had swum out
to the middle of the grey, grey sea,
you’d landed a plane there
and were waiting for me
but refused after all to take me home —
so I swam
half way back — or did I come to a shore
where others were.
RL: Interesting that you chose those poems. They are ones I too like a lot in part because they’re simple and small and straightforward. That book was never to see the light of day. I had lost the MS but a friend came across her copy & wrote that I should publish it. I thought many of the poems were too detailed & too personal, but thanks to Celia Gilbert’s insistence the book was soon published. White & gray I realize appears in the seagull one but I hadn’t thought about using white & gray several times in the book. Thanks for pointing that out. I loved Swampscott at one point in my life, then Gloucester became important, primarily because poet and occultist Gerrit Lansing was such a draw and of course Charles Olson put it on the map with The Maximus Poems.
JC: In his “Introductory Note” to your book, Ben Mazer offers this: “Near the end of his life, Bill Berkson read ask anyone and began writing Ruth a series of letters expressing his keen admiration: ‘I have this theory that every poet, including me, wants to write like the proverbial ‘ancient Chinese’ one on a mountain top; to write clearly, whether passionate or wise or both (can one be both?), to simply tell. Well, you’re a model of that.’”
Mazer’s words remind me of a response, as part of an interview interestingly enough, that Louis Zukofsky made: “I’d say the business of writing is to see as much as you can, to hear as much as you can, and if you think at all to think without clutter; then as you put the things together, try to be concise.”
I feel that the untitled poem below, from the collection’s penultimate section, is a perfect illustration of both Berkson’s and Zukofsky’s views. What do you think, Ruth?
driving through the streets
driving through the lights
that drive the city
the colors that change
moment to moment
all those
brown oak leaves in the median strip
a few flopping in the wind
flickering pages
and along the river
the pale lights in the high rises
the red lights’ sheen in
the painted green fence
that’s what I mean
tree’s limbs plain against
the tinted sky
the kids jogging
the time passing
RL: That’s my favorite poem in ask anyone, Joel; I’m so gratified that you chose it. You and I are likeminded: ultimately we seem to be taken by the simpler poems. Great quotation from Zukofsky. I stole the last line from a Creeley poem (though I don’t know which one). Sometimes I think someday I’ll write like Creeley but that’s ridiculous — only Creeley can write like Creeley. Anyway, he is always dealing with the form with his superb ear. But I do like the simplicity of the poem. People respond to it, it seems. I must have driven along the Charles a thousand times, and certain things often caught my eye and they appear here, for me the essentials of my drive home from work.
JC: The newest poems in your collection, the pieces that comprise the final section, on the way, seem to indicate a willingness on your part to stretch out, to expand your poetic forms. In the interest of saving space, I won’t quote any of those texts here. However, I want to ask if I’m at all accurate in making the previous assumption. And, finally, I must say that I’m particularly taken by the two long poems that focus on artists, “Calling All Cats” (for Cecil Taylor) and “Portrait of Cy Twombly.” I invite any remarks you may like to make about what drew you to these people and how their artistic endeavors are reflected in the two poems.
RL: Yes, it was time to go beyond my life and environs, especially because I’m trying to write some eco poetry. But these two are occasional poems. The Cy Twombly was written on the occasion of the Black Mountain College show at the ICA in Boston. Several of us were asked to choose a work of art, write a poem in relation to it, and give a reading of it in front of the work. I walked around the show a few times & Fielding Dawson’s portrait of Cy Twombly is the one I kept being drawn to. I wrote some of it while looking at the portrait, some from home on the computer. “Calling all Cats” was written for the 50th anniversary of jazz at the New England Conservatory, and read by me on the Cecil Taylor night. Cecil Taylor went to NEC and once I heard him play in Jordan and was excited by the energy and variety of his playing, in person. Also he writes wild poetry. I found myself reading some books on Twombly after the fact & got absorbed in his combination of words and images, his subtlety, his allusions, and his various long-term projects.
Joel Chace has published work in print and electronic magazines such as Tip of the Knife, Eratio, Otoliths, Word For/Word, and Golden Handcuffs Review. Most recent collections include Humors, from Paloma Press, Threnodies, from Moria Books, and fata morgana, from Unlikely Books.
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