wOrDsMiThS

 

 

LEONORE WILSON

 

 

John LeKay:  When did you first start writing poetry and who are some of the first poets that you read?
 

Leonore Wilson:   I started writing poetry in high school, John. Then I was in my freshman year at college at UCSC and was selected to be in an advanced poetry workshop. My influences: Plath, Sexton, Elliot. Those were and still are my influences.

JL:  I see how Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton in particular influence your work. Both were direct, unnerving, comical, confessional etc. What is it about T.S. Elliot's writing that you find appealing?

LW:  T.S. Elliot...ah, the humility, the lyric voice, the mythic, the spirituality, the philosophical...the idea of appreciating the traditional yet making it new.... He has a certain tenderness that tames my belligerence.

JL: There's a quote that Anne Sexton wrote about writing poetry, "Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard".  Many poets meditate, self medicate or other means in order to do this. Do you have a particular method that enables you to listen to your soul?

LW:  As far as my ways to trigger myself to be creative, ah, well I often reread poems that I have always treasured. I also look at the photographs of poets I know who like my work and give me courage. I keep their photos propped up by my computer; they are my guardian angels.

JL: What about your external environment. Where and how you live. I read that you live out in the wilderness and do not see too many people. It sounds really beautiful and peaceful. Is that also a source of inspiration for you?

LW:  Living in the wilderness is all I've ever really known. College ...I had terrible insomnia (not used to noise) and I don't know how I managed those undergrad years. Grad. school I lived mostly on the ranch with my three boys in diapers. Luckily my husband is the main breadwinner. As far as the acreage being inspirational, yes and no. I find myself needing to go to town at least three times a week. Nature can be isolating, solitude a bore. I haunt libraries. I trust that inheriting the land and keeping it wild is my of preserving goodness and peace. Learning fauna and flora has been a hobby of mine. It enables me to feel blessed I live where I do. The scientific terminology does manage to creep into my writing. I trust it enrichens it.

 

JL:   Plath and Sexton both lead amazing lives, extremely creative and died in similar ways.  Lord Byron remarked "We of the craft are all crazy".  The psychologist Kay Jamison has some very interesting theories on this. Do you have any theory's as to why so many poets suffer this way; Poets like Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe etc.?

Your poem "Stall"  to me, conjures up a sense of time passing slowly and entrapment.  Especially these lines.

This is the fuselage of the mind
When it reaches a certain station,
Not expecting glory or the jolt of praise.
Barely confident, pared clean.

What inspired the writing of this poem?

LW:  In all honesty, John, my best friend committed suicide a little over a year ago. We had known each other for over 20 years. We met at Squaw Valley Community of Writers. We both loved Plath. He knew Sylvia's mom quite well and was asked by Aurelia to write S's literary biography, which he did.  When my friend died, I felt shattered. (He was in his fifties and we talked about what it was to be a midlife poet.) After he took his life, I felt writing was vanity. I couldn't live without my best friend, my best critic, my soul. Writing didn't mean a thing.  Simply getting through a day was all I could do. The pain was exquisite. I acquainted this emptiness to the idea of Stall. I still feel I am in this place, but slowly climbing my way out.  And yes, I do have a barn with stalls.

JL: Has being a poet and being able to write about this loss been helpful for you or has it been even more painful having to face this through your writing?
 

LW:  Most people when you mention the "s" word run the other way. It has been both painful and redemptive to write about my friend. At first the poems were about me planting 100 bulbs waiting for the white flowers to appear, his favorite color. There was a need to find tenderness and nurturance, but many of the bulbs didn't bloom because the cattle found out my business. That made me grieve even more. Only lately am I writing poems again about missing my friend.  I think it exhibits a variety of emotions and thus is more true to my day to day moods.

 

Poet Who Hanged Himself among Doves....

Unhappiness moved into my narrow house when he left.....

The clock stopped, once telling the time
it drowned.

Sudden discomfort of familiar things.

No god led me out, no desert exodus.

Unhappiness dogging my steps,
biting through my bunches of notes.....

No necklace of words, no ring of syllables

Infinity’s long drawers opened.

I look at his graying photograph,
he’s alone in the room, scarcely discernable.

He’s not smiling.

Perceiving separation? Quite possibly.
 

Darkness has dust like a woman.
A dormant woman shaking things, and tying slow curtains.

I remember his young hysteria, his manic laughter
he was soaked like a goldfish in water.

The man who hugged me in his arms
had the fire of steel, the downpour of iron...

And I was half-naked Echo dancing on the beach in summer splendor
finding moon hills in his eyes.

Now I am the gate-keeper weeping.
A heap of metal half-seen.

He dressed the sky in watered silk
washed its backgrounds with the painter’s sure skill,
beaded it with mother-of-pearl.

He was Beauty rebuking arrows.
Arrows inside, outside

till he was drunk with thirst and shame.

Desire in him like a flame leaping higher than hares

Speak to me with the nightingale’s voice
inside my wind-pressed walls.

You who had thought you were born
in the blue throat of Egypt.

You who were drifting into old age...

I want to be the lily again on your lifted tongue,
your light’s shadow.

He fell for sadists with sweet smiles
Asses who could eat him alive.
Then he bled like a bride.

He was astonished at being a man
loving men.

A man alone
compiling a Domesday Book,

depending on men.

Despite everything,

I say, unhappiness moved in when he left.

No, his finger wags in my heart:
you’re asleep on your feet:

unhappiness was already there.

 

JL: I came across this study on suicide and poets. What do you think of this?

AUSTIN, Texas—Being a published poet is a high-risk occupation — more  dangerous than being a firefighter or deep-sea diver, says a University of  Texas at Austin psychologist who recently concluded a new study on language use in poetry. In his research of word choices of suicidal and non-suicidal poets, Dr. James W. Pennebaker concludes the writings of suicidal poets contained more words pertaining to the individual self, and fewer words pertaining to other people, than did those of non-suicidal poets.

"The study found support for a model that suggests that suicidal individuals are detached from others and pre-occupied with themselves," he said, adding that the findings further suggest linguistic predictors of suicide can be discerned through text-analysis. "By studying the poetry of suicidal vs. non-suicidal poets, we can begin to track the language of poets over the course of their careers and isolate which themes or linguistic features may predict future suicidal attempts."

Pennebaker conducted the research with Shannon Wiltsey Stirman of the University of Pennsylvania. The study is being published in the July/August issue of Psychosomatic Medicine. A grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, supported the research.

The purpose of the study was to determine whether distinctive features of language could be discerned in the poems of poets who committed suicide, and to test two suicide models using a text-analysis program. About 300 poems from the early, middle and late periods of nine suicidal poets and nine non-suicidal poets — from the 1800s to the present — were compared using the computer text analysis program, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC).

For comparison, the scholars chose six American pairs of poets, one British pair and two Russian pairs. The suicidal poets were Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adam Gordon, Sarah Teasdale, Hart Crane, Sergei Esenin and Vladimir Maiakovski. The corresponding non-suicidal poets were Robert Lowell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Matthew Arnold, Edna St. V. Millay, Joyce Kilmer, Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam.

"Suicidal poets use a large number of I's and a low number of references to other people or pronouns," said Pennebaker. "This holds up across their  careers, not just as they are approaching suicide." In addition, the suicidal poets tended to decrease their use of communication words such as "talk," "share" and "listen" over time, while the non-suicidal poets tended to increase their use of such words.

Suicide rates are much higher among poets than among authors of other literary forms as well as the general population. Previous studies, however, have generally been limited to examinations of the works of single poets, said Pennebaker. In addition, he said, these poems generally have not been selected over the poet's entire careers and were chosen based on their theme or examined according to their proximity to suicide attempts.

One surprise result of the research was the finding that suicidal and non-suicidal poets don't differ in references to sad or happy emotions. In fact, both suicidal and non-suicidal poets use more positive emotional words than negative words, said Pennebaker. "It's not the sadness, it's the isolation and failure to connect with others that comes through in their poetry," he said.
 

LW:   I don't know if I agree with this study. Lowell was confessional, manic and had suicidal thoughts, did he not? Plath was put on an anti-dep. drug plus codeine when she died, a toxic mix but was she warned? My friend who took his life wrote about history, mostly about Russian history and WW11. He rarely wrote about himself or his partner. Those are some examples why I don't necessarily agree with the study. But then again, I'm not a linguist.

JL:  Have you been able to talk about this with your students? I read somewhere that when some poetry teacher's talk about Plath, Sexton, they leave out their suicides because it's too disturbing.

LW:  I have always given the biographies of poets in my teaching. I don't see suicide as a shameful thing; it can be a courageous act.
 

JL:  When did you write "The Monarchs" and what inspired this poem?

LW:  "The Monarchs" was written about two weeks ago. I went to see an Oregon Ash down in the dry creekbed near the hunters' camp. Hunting season was just over, thankfully. There to take photos of this glorious tree when I noticed in the creekbed, literally hundreds of monarchs flocking to this little strand of mud. Mind you the creekbed was very dry. I was awed! They perched on the "wetness" and were sated and flew off. Amazing, eh? I thought of how I want to take the spirit of my friend (yes, that same one) and carry him from the dead and spread his goodness or give it flight. In other words, the idea of resurrection is alive. I'd like to think we might be able to spread the essence of those we lost somewhat like those butterflies that found succor when life seemed arid....

JL:  I think all these poems are really beautiful. I could imagine they would make an amazing book.  Are you thinking about putting together a book of your new work at some point?

LW: As far as a book, a book of my own. I am only now getting back to thinking of publishing, etc. Len's suicide turned my life into more of a monkish one than I was previously. Art is sanity, that I know. But there is much beside Art. One of those things is living a spiritual existence. I read a lot of gnostic literature and Catholic thinkers.   Some tragedies and mysteries and beauties are beyond explaining or simple conversation. We need the grace and courage and power of art.

 

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