WRITER’S VOICE INTERVIEW WITH WALLY SWIST – October 4, 2005

Interviewers: Francesca Rheannon, Daisy Mathias.

Writer’s Voice is produced by Francesca Rheannon with co-hosts Francesca Rheannon and Daisy Mathias.

FR: Well, Wally Swist, welcome to Writers Voice.

W. S.: Francesca, thank you. It's good to be here.

DM: It's nice to have you.

FR: You are famous for working in the genre of haiku. And I wonder if you could say a little bit first of all, what is haiku, and then tell us a little bit about what attracted you to the genre — or did attract you?

W. S.: Haiku is the juxtaposition of two or more images that provides insight into nature or human nature. It's often been mistranslated as a poem that's written in lines of five-seven-five syllables. In Japanese, it is much of the time, yet there's no viable word for "syllable" in Japanese, except for onji, o-n-j-i-, which is sign/symbol or symbol/sign. That's how it translates for us. Also in Japanese, even vowels are counted as syllables, so the Japanese haiku is even briefer than our poem in English. The English equivalent is 12 to 14 syllables to the Japanese 17 onji. That's my answer to the first part of that question.

FR: In illustration of that, I wonder if you would be willing to read a haiku.

W. S.: I would love to. "far into twilight/ milkweed seeds cross the meadow,/ the evening star.  “far into twilight/ milkweed seeds cross the meadow,/ the evening star."

I know that not everybody who would read haiku aloud, reads it twice, but I think that it's important, because the images, when the poem works, are a rich enough that the listener needs to really imbibe them, we need to hear them more than once.

F. R.: Well, that's really true because I found myself reading them at least twice.

WS: There's a really wonderful poem by Billy Collins, entitled Japan, and in the poem, he speaks about savoring a haiku, I believe it's Basho's haiku about the temple bell and the peonies. The temple bell resounds and the peonies seem to be collecting the sound.  So Billy walks from one room to another all day long and says a haiku and then says it again and again and it's just a terrific poem. In reading Billy, oh, maybe in the mid-eighties, I had realized that his poems opened up one perception, one idea, and then -- this was a 40 line poem -- then I saw that possibility in my own work.  So, I am no longer practicing in the haiku genre, my poems are layered with images and they open up in a different way.

DM: Haiku itself sounds like it's a good discipline for writing poetry in general.

W. S.: That was my plan in my early twenties. I came to haiku vis a vis Zen. And I was practicing, very seriously practicing, with a group of people. I had a mentor, a man named Ed Bednar, he was working on his Ph.D. dissertation with Harold Bloom at that time on D. H. Lawrence and Ed pretty much showed me what to read, especially in Eastern literature, Eastern philosophy and I came upon haiku. Started writing my own very wooden, I call them wooden versions, in circa '73 to '75 and then I started to publish a few. Brooks Books, who published The Silence Between, had a small magazine then.

FR: The Silence Between Us-- this is your book of haiku that was published in—

W. S.: May of this year. But I'm completing a 30-year cycle with them because 30 years ago they were accepting my very early attempts for a journal that is no longer extant. So, basically then I remember making my literary pilgrimage to San Francisco in the mid-seventies. I did a lot of hitchhiking then and I would actually tell people who picked me up, they asked me what I was doing and I said, "Well, I'm writing haiku but I'm training myself." You know, I felt that if I could write three good lines every day, I could write 20 good lines. So to answer your question, yes, I think it's a very fine discipline. I stopped writing haiku for about five years. Upon moving to an apartment in a refurbished barn on the north Amherst, on the Cushman/Leverett, line in 1984, I picked up the discipline again.

FR: Why was that? Was the place you moved to, did it have something to do with picking it up again?

W. S.: Well, the barn still exists. It's in the middle of the meadow on the property that abuts Haskins Meadow Conservation Area and it wasn't called that then. So I thought that if I were going to pick it up again, I would do so there. An idyllic place. From ‘84 through ‘97 or ‘98 I wrote some five to six thousand haiku. It was my discipline, it was my way of life, it was a spiritual way of life. I truly felt that I was much like Van Gogh, painting in the field of sunflowers. I just couldn't stop. Now, I was also working on longer poems -- longer lyric and shorter narrative poems -- at the same time. Of those several thousand, I had published over 900. The story about this collection, The Silence Between Us, is in the summer of 2002, I felt a responsibility to gather the work. So I gathered some four hundred poems that were collected, and I contacted Lee Gurga, who was the editor of Modern Haiku, the most respected periodical devoted to the genre in North America. Well, he wrote me back and said, "I went through the first eighty pages and if you could stand it, we’ll do the rest of the book together." We were looking for a very tightly juxtaposed collection. Each poem resonates off the other poems. So you can open this book or any of my books, hopefully, and you could read a poem or a haiku at any juncture, but if you read from the first to the last, there's a pattern.

FR: Now, I wanted to ask you about the title, because it seems like it has a double meaning, from the poems in the book. "The silence between us" can be on the one hand, a kind of honoring of attention, and you talk about the attention that haiku bids you to pay, that silence of listening to things. But on the other hand, it also seems to chronicle to some degree some separation, some conflict that was occurring in your own domestic situation at the time. Is that true?

WS: I think that sometimes when we as authors choose titles, when we do it well, I think that it provides various resonances. Raymond Roseliep, who was a priest out of Dubuque, Iowa, he died in 1980, wrote traditional verse and in 1970 Raymond began to write and publish haiku. And he referred to haiku as a peephole to infinity. I always thought that that was a good phrase to attempt to define what the best -- trying to write haiku is a rather difficult artistic –

FR: Talk about that. What are the difficulties, what are the struggles you go through?

W. S.: It's not just concision, but it's so easily can fall into your notes being just nature notes.

FR: What you mean by that?

WS: There were years that I would walk various trails and I couldn't stop making notes, because the more you look, as Mary Oliver says, “the more you look, the more you see.” With respect to that, it's rather difficult to be that mindful and to be living so enormously in the moment that each of your observations will have that psychic or spiritual jolt that actually defines what a good haiku is.

FR: Well, you know it's interesting, because one of the first poems that caught my attention is one that echoes, I think, the title and it has nothing to do with nature. And I'll just say it, because it’s short enough to do it, but I'll only say once. "silence/ after our argument/ crumpled cigarette pack uncurling."

W. S.: That's the haiku of mine that people often respond to. All I can say is that sometimes the best of haiku has, the phrase is, "has a stink of Zen to it", in the sense that it's -- haiku has often been taught as being a poem written in lines of 5/7/5 syllables that espouses nature and they're all pretty, but life is not always pretty and to actually paraphrase Mary Oliver in one of her interviews that I believe I read, that sometimes we do actually have to look at what is dark and if we don't, then we're not kept honest. We don't keep ourselves honest.

DM: The silences -- and there are many different kinds of silences -- the juxtaposition of the word "silence" next to the word "argument" and the image tell us what kind of silence it is, but doesn't it also call up the idea that there are other kinds of silences? Isn't that inherent in that?

W. S.: Eric Amann, who is a Canadian physician, wrote a beautiful book back in the sixties, when he was one of the pioneers in the haiku movement, he wrote a book about haiku entitled THE WORDLESS POEM. So, I think that with my immersion in the genre I think, for better than three decades, I think we practice any discipline and then you present it as your attempts in an aesthetic form. I think that there might be resonances. Hopefully there would be many resonances on many levels and I hope that that's what the book can provide. I think that, in the very least, the book can provide an introduction, some sort of precipitation to read haiku. At its very best, haiku can enliven our senses and heighten our awareness, and in my estimation that's why we're here.

FR: And here's one that talks of conversation, instead of silence. And I also really loved it. "chimney smoke/ graying the twilight--/ our conversation deepens." The evocative nature of that: chimney smoke, you think of the hearth, the hearth is right there, without you having to mention it. And then that sense of time, of the intimacy, the growing intimacy as the twilight grays, and then our conversation -- it really just builds. You also have a lot of the haiku tied to the seasons and also to a sense of place.

W. S.: I'm big on sense of place and on many levels. I think, being a self-proclaimed naturalist, and my writing being mostly nature oriented, it would also define my own politics with reference to the land and sense of place. I had come to the Valley in ‘81 and then left the Valley in ’98 to take a job at Trinity College in Hartford and came back in 2003, when I was awarded a writing residency at the Robert Francis cottage—

FR: Could you say what that is for our listeners?

WS: Sure, Robert Francis, I'm surprised how many people are unaware of Robert. Robert Francis lived in Amherst from 1940 -- well, actually he came to Amherst in 1928 but he lived in Cushman on Market Hill Road in a house he built from 1940 until his death in 1987. Robert Frost referred to him as the best unknown poet in America. Robert published 13 books, 11 of which he wrote at Fort Juniper, he called the cottage "Fort Juniper" because juniper is very difficult to destroy and the cottage is still standing. I referred to Robert as a secular saint. From 1940 until 1950 he pretty much made his living giving music lessons, violin and piano. He had 2 degrees from Harvard. In 1950, he made the decision to become a full-time writer, if he wasn't almost that already. And pretty much made his living from doing Chautauqua’s in New York State in the summer, giving an occasional reading at one of the academic institutions in the area and he wrote for the “Christian Science Monitor.” His average income from ’50 there on was about $500 a year. I knew Robert, I was the book buyer at the Jeffrey Amherst bookshop, and Robert would walk into town. He was then over 80. His hands trembled so much, I would hold hardcover copies of his collected poems from UMass Press and he would sign them. In 1984, I parked my green Volkswagen beetle at the side of the road, because I had seen Robert gardening, wearing his broad-brimmed straw hat. I remember walking up the driveway that now I've walked up and down so many times, and I remember my knees trembling. I got up to the garden, I took a deep breath and before I could finish two sentences, Robert interrupted me. The first sentence was, "Robert, I greatly admire your work," and my second sentence was, "I'm attempting to be a writer." That's the one he interrupted. He said, "I will see you tomorrow at one o'clock."

DM: Oh my God!

WS: And that became a weekly Monday visit for the last 2 1/2 years of his life.

FR: And what did you do with him?

WS: Oh, I would run him into town; we would pick up prescriptions at the Rexall on the corner, when it was there; I would open this mail, I'd read to him. Once, Barry Moser left a box of books. We were in town. When we got back -- we'd just missed Barry -- Robert was blind, so I had to lead him up and I told him there was a box of books on the porch, and Pennyroyal Press had just issued a volume of Robert’s, which is not poetry, it's entitled The Trouble with God and they were theological essays. Very heavy theological essays. So there were 11 essays and I read one each for the next 11 weeks. Once, I remember Robert leaning back in the rocking chair after, this wonderful October light, afternoon light, coming in the west windows of the cottage, he leaned back in his rocking chair and he said to me, "Gee, I could sure think when I was younger." I would sometimes read my own work. I was very discerning in that, though, because on occasion he would say nothing. That would sometimes leave me, it would leave me with my stomach churning, and then sometimes he would say to me, "that will be in your next collection." So, he is my major literary father, so having lived there for the last two years has been, I would have to say -- and I don't say this out of trying to make more of this than not, or out of exaggeration -- but the two most significant years of my life.

DM: Now, did he leave his cottage to be used by poets?

WS: Yes, he did. It's in his will. He died in 1987. Jack Gilbert was one of the first residents and Linda Greg was there, Doug Anderson was there. Peter Baldwin, who is a composer who works at UMass, was the resident before I became resident. It's from September through September, so I began in September 2003. In the winter, in early March, I contacted the trustees and I was given a rare second year. So I've been very fortunate.

DM: So you are there now.

WS: I'm there now. I'm pulling work together, I have about three weeks left and I have a new manuscript entitled Small Miracles.

FR: So, tell us a little bit about the work you were doing now. I understand that you left the haiku genre, at least for the time being. Why did you leave it and what are you doing now?

WS: I felt I needed to do something else with my creative work and of course I was also, all along, writing lyric and short narratives. I'm an imagist. What does that mean? Well, I think Denise Levertov, when she spoke of Bert Meyers, who is a West Coast poet, she said of his work, "it straddles the line between cliché and an exact image." So the images really need to sing.

FR: But how is that different from any poetry, poetry is surrounded in image?

WS: Oh, I read a lot of poets and a lot of poems that are not. I feel that there's a lot of narrative going on. A lot of prose in poetry and I can espouse the work of several people. I've been reading Mary Oliver since ’75 and I can say that some of the latter work is a bit loose, but House of Light by Mary Oliver is perhaps the most perfect book of poems I've ever read.

FR: She's one of our favorites.

DM: It's a wonderful book. So that the haiku remains the kind of soil around the plant of the present poems.

WS: Well, how I can answer that is that the haiku moment, the moment of awareness opens up for me and I think, let me just read a couple of poems. My experience at Robert’s has been, I'd like to describe it in a phrase as “a stony Thomas Merton-like solitude.” And it has been that. This poem addresses my experience. It's entitled, "A Deeper Quiet, Then Silence":

[READS POEM:

Sometimes the quiet here in the cabin

is so keen that there’s a ringing;

a burning away of inequities,

the way Isis placed the queen’s

baby daughter into the flames,

then turned her into a sparrow that flew

around the room whenever the queen

entered.  The quiet and silence

restorative, then I enter the sound

of the river from the bridge above it,

and am filled by the movement

in the rush of water, how the river

streams to flow beyond, healing with

the sound of its rush, before

I walk back to the cabin, and

reenter a deeper quiet, then silence.]

DM: That's nice. Another poem of yours I love is “The Kitchen Table”, because it's both very grounded in place, but almost like a haiku in its spot images.

FR: Would you like to read that?

WS: Sure, I will honor Daisy’s request.

[READS POEM:

Always elegant

whenever lit with radiant

ears of sweet corn,

where drinking glasses

leave rings, where we

make commitments and

look out at the stars,

where sometimes on

Saturday night she places

a slender crystal vase

in the center

that contains the one

long-stemmed rose

I brought home.]

FR: Now I have the opportunity to ask somebody who requests the poem, what attracted you to that poem?

DM: The quality of place and silence and meaningfulness that comes off the page. You said earlier that you feel like that's why we’re here, to be here fully present. And a poem like that is fully present.

WS: Thank you, Daisy. That's my attempt. I think being fully present, that's my discipline now. I think that's my artistic as well as spiritual discipline. Let me try to illustrate that.

[READS “Snow Geese:”

Their honking and trumpeting precede them

through the canopy of leafless trees and pine branches.

I look up to see their white feathers and—Oh!—

the roundness of their heavy bodies, triumphant in the air.

I see the wedge spread over the woods—Oh!

And watch them streaming slowly,

one after another, against the clouds,

before the bugles of their voices—Oh!—fade.

And I stand in the rain—Oh!—that turns into the white

snow of their cries falling in the silence of their passage.]

[End of Part 1 of Interview]

Part Two

[Begins with Wally Swist reading poem “Practicing Mindfulness:

1.

All day the rain blows in gusts, mist moves in

to swirl above the crackling of fallen leaves,

to fill the branches of the trees where their foliage

had been, then disappears, and reappears, the wind

driving browned pine needles through the air.

I cartwheel the rotted skids I cleared

a hundred feet down the slope behind the cabin,

then lay out the new pine skids I acquired

from the lumber yard for free.

2.

I practice mindfulness in moving

the split wood onto the skids: at first one piece

in either hand, then I develop carting

an armload, the grit from the wood

muddying my work gloves, and the rain

falling hard enough that I change hats

from my beret to my Provincetown ball cap.

I stack the wood on the three skids

farthest from the cabin four feet high;

the skid I place closest to the front door,

I stack higher.  Sometimes a knot in a piece

of split wood looks back at me like an eye,

and I move through the mist and pelting rain

all afternoon to finish just before darkness—

only the slash of the pile remaining.]

DM: I’m interested in the fact that you don't drop your voice on the end of the last line, as if the poem is going on after you finish reading it.

WS: I think it's probably how I heard it.

FR: What do you mean by that?

W. S.: Well, I'm not sure how it is for other writers, but I either hear a music or I hear a line or I hear my inner voice.

DM: Or a cadence?

WS: A cadence? In the introduction—the two facets of the new book that I’m really quite pleased with are that I did write an author’s introduction to the book at Fort Juniper in the spring of ’04. And I wrote another prose piece there, but I've always been fond of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s book, it's a super book, entitled How Verses Are Made and it was originally published by Cape Galliard, which was a subsidiary of Penguin Books at that particular time, in the early seventies, and Mayakovsky would walk the streets of Moscow, and would walk and recite in his mind the poem or poems he was working on and his rhythm would dictate the cadence of the poem. So yes, a cadence, as well, and sometimes all three occur and sometimes only one. It’s amazing to me how new things open up in various ways.

FR: And going on from that, this is a really lovely essay, the author’s preface, “The Poetics of Walking” it’s entitled, referencing Mayakovsky. You also go on to talk about Mary Oliver and kind of the role of chance or of sudden —

WS: Serendipity.

FR: Serendipity! That's it. And, so, if I can just read, you say "The poet Mary Oliver is said to squirrel pencils in the crevices of various limbs of trees on her favorite walks. How delightful it is to create one's own serendipity! The poetics of my own poetry originate in this manner. Over many years, it’s in the manner of learning the names of the flora that present themselves in such an array through each of the seasons on my walks. In this knowledge of being able to name what I see in the natural world precipitates the language in the poems that open themselves to me. And I wasn't sure what you meant by that. How does that happen? Your ability to name what you see—

W. S.: Well, it seems, even at this stage, that every spring or summer or whatever the season might be, especially in spring and summer, that I'm able to come away with that particular year with the names of another moth or another butterfly or another tree or  wildflowers that I had seen but had no name for —

FR: And what does that do to your poetry?

W. S.: Oh, names are, being able to name, there's an immense power, positive, almost alchemical power, in that: being able to name something, such as coltsfoot, that lovely yellow flower in the side of the road in early spring. And it's so evocative. We have names and when, Daisy or Francesca, I address you by name, that's honoring the spirit that's in you, but it's in all of us and to be able to name something— I think how I can tersely answer your question is that when I was managing a bookstore at Trinity College in Hartford, I became elated one evening because I opened a box and there were books on ferns I had ordered, and one of my student workers kind of said, "Oh, ho-hum," and I said, "Well, look at these. These are British Soldiers and that's the name of a specific fern. And I said, "Isn't it great that you can name these and you could see them again and again and think, "Oh my, British Soldiers," and she got it! You know, she did get it.

FR: And yet, Shakespeare says, "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Do you not agree?

DM: But it would have another name. [Laughter.]

W. S.: It would have another name. And it would be important to know that name and even if it were nameless, that it would be nameless.

FR: Then, what about the Zen idea, or I don't know if it is a Zen idea, but just that kind of idea that in naming things we distance ourselves from their imminent reality.

W. S.: OK, let me read a poem and then I can answer that — you ask very fine questions. I'm going to read a poem entitled "Trailing Arbutus”. Trailing arbutus is our state wildflower.

DM: I had a friend who named her kittens with flower names, and one of them was named "Trailing Arbutus". Isn’t that lovely?

WS:  Trailing Arbutus. Before I read this, I'd like to answer— I have notion of how I could answer your question. If we could only say, "tree, flower, door," we'd be at a loss. But if we say, "honey locust" or if we say,

FR: "Weeping willow"

W. S.: "weeping willow," or if we say, "shag bark hickory," oh, what a joy and this is Trailing Arbutus.  This is my lead-in:

[READS “Trailing Arbutus:”

I look for you intently, on my knees, among

Drifted leaf litter near mountain summits, to find

Your small, almost translucent white petals,

blushing pink, barely open.  Once, only

too common, you were sold on street corners

in Boston in the late 1890s.  Your shy flowers

are hidden beneath your rough, oval evergreen

leaves that too soon turn brown, but to have

inhaled your redolence is to know the sweet

excess of more than enough, why you are

also known as the poet’s flower.

Little flower of irony, impatient to bloom

even before the last patches of snow begin

to melt, you are too quick to vanish.]

FR: Bravo! It makes me want to go out and see one! Right now! Although I'm afraid it's vanished by now.

W. S.: It's vanished by now.

[END]