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Number
291
Summer 2003
Poet of a World In Danger:
Talking with Suzanne Lummis
BETH HOUSTON
Copyright © 2003 Poetry Flash
Suzanne Lummis, poet and teacher, brings her urban attitude
to the page in her newest collection, In Danger. Los
Angeles, where Lummis is an award-winning teacher at UCLA Extension
and Director of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, provides a haunting
backdrop for her forceful, driven poems. Wearing her trademark
beret, she cuts a kind of diva-impresario figure on the L.A. literary
scene as writer, influential teacher, performer, poetic instigator,
and member of Nearly Fatal Women, a performance group that focuses
on language. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry
International, The Antioch Review, Everyman Anthology: Poems of
the West, Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, and in Place
as Purpose: Poetry of the Western States. This interview,
conducted in October of 2002, explores the wide range of influences—from
boxer Roy Jones, Jr. to poet Sylvia Plath—on her own poetry
and on contemporary poetry in general. —Editors
BETH HOUSTON: Your book is titled In Danger, and
the world you describe is certainly dangerous and sinister, right
down to the elements—the weather, for example. Is this pretty
much your world view, or is it one facet of it?
SUZANNE LUMMIS: I remember a magazine
photograph of a huge, ultramodern apartment building, narrow and
sort of scallop-shaped, in Berlin, or was it Buenos Aires…These
were luxury condos with lots of glass, little patios with wrought
iron railings overlooking some splendid vista. And you could see
right through a great charred hole in the center of that building.
A small plane had lost control and crashed into the structure,
taking out about three apartments and everyone in them. Those
people watching the evening news, or sautéing some vegetables,
or reaching for the phone, had no reason to imagine they were
breathing their last. But they were. I looked at the photo, and
I thought, there’s no safe place in this world, no safe
haven, nowhere one gets guarantee from fate that nothing can go
wrong. The ground can open under you—especially here in
California. Or tons of metal can fall out of the sky. On this
last point I think we’re in collective agreement now, here
in the U.S.
Having said all this, which seems awfully downbeat. I should mention
I don’t think I’m a fearful person. If anything, I
seem to be less fearful than many people. I simply don’t
take it for granted that I’m guaranteed to be here even…well,
minutes from now.
BH: Your poems are so vivid
they seem to have come directly from your own experience—not
that that’s necessarily the case. Are any of your poems
verbal reenactments of actual events of your life?
SL: Since one of my aims—not the
only one—is to convey the wild energies and various contradictory
events of the city—comic, horrible, wistful—the core
event of the poem is nearly always from life. My life. There’s
very little need for me to dream up the central galvanizing experience.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to those poems that are clearly
whimsical or fantastical, or persona poems, or things that obviously
cross back or forth between the imagination and the exterior world—like
the poem that closes In Danger, “When in Doubt
Have a Man Come Through the Door with a Gun in his Hand.”
This rose from my effort to take severe psychological crisis—an
abstract, intangible thing—and press it into the language
of the physical world, while trying to transmit the fearful chaotic
quality, the absolute uncertainty of everything. My friend, the
delightful poet Steve Kowit, said to me, “I don’t
get it. Why don’t you just explain to the reader exactly
what happened”? Which of course is the kind of solid, sound
advice I give to my intermediate students. Which is why this input
didn’t work for me. I’m not an intermediate student.
I told him, “Believe me, if I described to you exactly what
went down, you’d be a lot more confused.” This effort
represents the best I can do, the farthest I can go, in pushing
the incomprehensible toward the brink of what can be grasped.
BH: So some of the poems are
representations of psychological truth rather than literal events.
SL: To some extent. But I sometimes
feel uneasy with poetry that bears all the trappings of autobiography,
that incorporates recognizable elements of the author’s
background as noted in their bio, and that remains in the sort
of voice and manner we associate with the autobiographical poem,
but turns out to be made up. Turns out to be made up when the
writer blurts out the truth—now there’s a slippery
word—in some writer’s conference panel. And I’m
thinking, Hmmm…I don’t know about this. It seems to
me, in certain cases, that the poet is then appropriating elements
that are the province of fiction while avoiding some of the hard
work that fiction demands. And I don’t really mean by this
that it’s easier to write poetry than fiction. But the easiest
thing about fiction is the inventing of the quirky or comic or
dramatic or pathos-filled central circumstances, and I think the
hardest part involves the persuasive, detailed creation of the
surrounding world and its characters. So that’s what I mean
when I say some poets may be making off with the easier task of
fiction.
BH: Could you give us an example of what you
mean by poets appropriating fictional elements?
SL: Here’s a curious story—not
in the realm of poetry, actually, but nonfiction prose. Annie
Dillard opens her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of essays,
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, with a fast-paced, highly imagistic,
virtuoso piece on her hunter cat who softly pressed the blood
of its kill on to her. I love this section, and sometimes use
it in class to show the overlap between poetry and prose, poetry
and nonfiction. Great stuff. I remember thinking, though—Strange,
the Pacific Northwest must breed a different sort of cat. And
the birds and mice must be different, too; they must gush out
blood. Because I’ve owned cats; I know cats, and I know
it doesn’t go down like that. They don’t wind up with
blood all over their paws, as if they’d stepped on an ink
pad and now go around leaving rosy imprints. They don’t
like stuff on their paws anyway; they’d probably lick off
any foreign substance before you saw it. And I’ve rescued
birds and mice from my cats—those little things don’t
produce that much plasma. The point is, though, I was sold; I
believed her account despite everything. Then when I read that
some readers were disgruntled because Annie Dillard admitted she
had never owned a cat, and that this was her invention, I was
struck by the fact that I’d been prepared to believe a skillful,
richly rendered prose account over the evidence of my own experience.
I wasn’t exactly angry at Annie Dillard, not in this particular
case—it’s still fine writing, and I guess one has
to be grateful for that. But I was a little annoyed with myself.
And I might be a bit more on guard with Annie Dillard, and certain
other people, too. I mean, I don’t want a writer to f**k
with me, you know?
BH: At the very least, writers should be accurate.
It’s an interesting question with nonfiction—which
is clearly not fiction—whether such details, presented as
coming from one’s own experience, are poetic license or
just plain dishonest. And if we should allow ‘creative nonfiction’
to be more like fiction than nonfiction. And if the author has
the responsibility to clarify. Dillard, presumably, was not writing
autobiography, though she may have led some to think she was.
I’m curious to know if you would characterize your poetry
as confessional? autobiographical? loosely autobiographical?
SL: Actually , none of the above quite
resonate with me—even though details and events great and
small, directly from my life, are everywhere in evidence throughout
much of my poetry. ‘Confessional’ poetry…I wonder,
does anyone today define their work with that term? Even Sharon
Olds seems to have devised a new definition for her work: “apparently
personal.”
BH: Poets like Sharon Olds might not define their
work as confessional, but others do still classify it in that
way. I think ‘confessional’ is an unfortunate term,
but nonetheless it’s become a valid designator of a particular
poetic genre—maybe the only genre that persistently receives
both tremendous applause and critique.
SL: ‘Confessional’ implies
that one has set out boldly to reveal the most intimate, and perhaps
sensational, circumstances of one’s life and we should all,
like, care.
BH: Some readers do care. ‘High confessional’
does sell. It’s juicy gossip, after all.
SL: I wonder what the use of this might
be in the age of Jerry Springer and radio psychiatrists who take
callers on the air. In any case, I don’t do that; I don’t
write like that. In fact, I sometimes engineer devices of concealment.
Or within the poem I’ll move the focus away from something
I don’t want the reader to investigate too closely, because…well,
it’s personal. But my work is pretty damn personal anyway,
despite my efforts . I don’t cleave to their term ‘autobiographical’
because it suggests an inward and backward looking method—into
the self and back at one’s reservoir of memories, childhood,
etc. For the most part, that’s not where I fix my gaze.
God, I’d get bored after a while. What’s fascinating
to me is the self in interaction with some surrounding landscape
and its people.
Last fall the L.A. Times interviewed me for an interesting article
about poetry’s effectiveness, or lack of, in responding
to a country’s collective crisis. And somewhere in that
piece I said it’s the poet’s task to try to bear the
harsh and luminous world into language. I’ll stand by that.
I very deliberately open In Danger by introducing the reader into
the Eastside L.A. neighborhood and downscale apartment where I
produced most of these poems. “First the Weather.”
I want the reader to get a feeling for the particular urban landscape
from which many of these poems sprang.
BH: Can poetry ever be truly cathartic? If so,
what makes poetry cathartic rather than, say, venting for its
own sake, or scab-picking, or just plain narcissism?
SL: I just saw a really exciting Roy
Jones, Jr. fight on HBO, so I’m thinking about the definition
of ‘catharsis’ and what the difference might be between
catharsis and pure adrenaline rush. I have a beat-up 1907 edition
of The Poetics of Aristotle, and I’m surprised, and a bit
put out, that ‘catharsis’ doesn’t seem to be
in there. Now I’m wondering if it might have been Euripides
who defined that term.
BH: Actually catharsis is in the Poetics and
is the last part of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy “through
pity and fear,”—I prefer empathy and awe—“bringing
about the purgation”—katharsis, often with a ‘k’—“of
these emotions.”
SL: I think catharsis implies that one
is pulled down into some place of great emotion, and through immersion
in this intense feeling, and a sense of identification with the
character, or poem, various related and residual emotions are
swept through and out. Isn’t it a sort of emotional house-cleaning?
BH: I think of it as an even deeper house-cleaning
that’s manifested—articulated—through emotion.
SL: My dictionaries define it with the
word ‘purge/purging,’ which doesn’t sound too
attractive—too much like something you could buy over-the-counter
at Rite-Aid. I don’t get that from reading poetry, not quite
that. I get something extraordinary from writing it—I mean
if I’m happy with what turned up—but not sure if it’s
catharsis. I know that among the panoply of emotions available
to me the particular sensation that comes with writing stands
alone, and there is no substitute. Oddly, I’ve seen people
who aren’t accustomed to poetry, or the language of poetry,
get caught off guard and swept off their feet. And in some cases
those who are accustomed to poetry’s way of working can
become slightly inured.
One of my students, who’s now a good poet in her own right—Cathie
Sandstrom Smith—gave a little book of poetry to one of her
colleagues at a…I think it was some kind of households fair
for wholesalers or something. This chapbook included the best
from my beyond-the-master class-quite strong, effective work.
As Cathie relayed the story, the woman stood there among the linens
and venetian blinds, reading and crying openly, turning the page,
reading, crying some more, through the whole book. On the other
hand, I showed the same little collection to a poet of high rank,
and straight off she zeroed in like a heat-seeking missile, nailing
one weak line.
When I come upon a poem that knocks me out, I experience a mixture
of pain and pleasure, and 50/50 so far as I can tell—pleasure
for the obvious reasons, pain because, dammit, someone other than
me wrote the thing. That doesn’t quite seem to fit the definition
of catharsis either, so I must conclude, finally, that the closest
I get to that noble state is while watching the fights.
BH: The fights—hmm. Punches rather than
poetics.
SL: If I had a choice of ringside seats
for a Roy Jones, Jr. fight or front row for a reading of the greatest
living poet, I’d go for the Roy Jones fight. If I could
see a reading by T.S. Eliot or Elizabeth Bishop returned from
the dead, or a fight between Roy Jones, Jr. and the long gone
Sugar Ray Robinson, or the now retired Roberto Duran, or Marvin
Hagler, I’d of course go for the historic light-heavy match.
Why shouldn’t I? Unless they learned something in The Beyond,
like they somehow picked up some presentation skills, T.S. Eliot
would give a kind of monotonous reading, and Bishop would be so
bad she’d drive me nuts. She’d practically ruin those
poems for me is what she’d do.
BH: I know how you feel. I’ve heard recordings
of their readings. The antithesis of a boxing match. But then
boxers practice till they sweat blood and perform as if something
that mattered was at stake.
SL: If I could see a truly great Roy
Jones, Jr. fight, one in which he could finally take on someone
who possesses anything close to his speed, power and improvisational
genius, well, that would make for a lifelong memory. That experience
would not disappoint. I might have a heart attack from the excitement,
but I wouldn’t be disappointed.
BH: But isn’t that just part of the adrenaline
rush you mentioned earlier?
SL: I’m still in the glow of last
night’s fight, so let me attempt to construct a boxing metaphor
that will pertain to poetry. At the end, Jones backed up toward
the ropes, bent his elbows and put both hands behind his back.
Never have I seen such a thing, or heard or read about a move
like that. And Kelly went for him—see, Jones suckered him
in—then Jones came around with his right and just took the
guy out.…
BH: Like a good punch line, no pun intended. That element
of surprise.
SL: Exactly. Now Jones raises chickens
and he’s incorporated the strange spirit and jerky quickness
of the chicken into his fight style. So in the replay you could
see what he did, he made chicken wings with his arms. It’s
curious in terms of language. ‘Chicken’ stands as
one of the oldest playground insults for coward, but this guy’s
utterly converted the meaning of, even our understanding of, the
word ‘chicken.’ He may even be converting our sense
of the animal itself. He’s raised this low, ungainly dimwitted
creature to a thing of totemic power. Because he’s good
enough to pull it off. He willed it. It’s what poets can
do if they’re good enough—alter our perception of
a thing, ennoble something we took to be mundane or even contemptible.
Afterwards, the commentator asked him about the move. What was
that! Where did that come from! And Jones said: “It’s
hard to explain things like that when you’re a born fighter.
I’m a born fighter. And I have moves in me I don’t
even know are there until the time comes for me to use them.”
I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that the same
might be said of born poets.
BH: How did you first come to poetry? Who were
your early influences, both poets that you read and poet mentors?
When did you really know you were a poet?
SL: Early influences—Do you mean my very earliest? Eugene
Field’s “Winken, Blinken and Nod.” In fact,
to this day I find that an enchanting piece. For its rhythms and
wistful mood it’s a thing of beauty. I was also taken with
Noye’s “The Highwayman.” Of course it’s
basically a tawdry story, the stuff of supermarket romance novels.
But I liked it for that. I didn’t have television, after
all, up there in the mountains, and the nearest movie theater
involved a one-hour drive to Reno. And my parents were not inclined
to head out into the blizzard, get snow chains onto the tires,
and negotiate down the curving two-lane ridge of Donner Pass just
to sit through some dumb movie. So for sensational narratives
I had to entertain myself with “The Highwayman.” In
my defense I should mention that I also appreciated the poem’s
affecting imagery.
BH: Were you writing poetry when you were young?
Many poets say they knew quite early on that they were or would
become a poet.
SL: I knew I was a poet by age eight
and eleven months.
BH: That’s so specific. What happened that made
you know right then?
SL: My family was in Mexico for the
summer—a bit before my ninth birthday. There was a full
moon, hammocks slung under the cabañas, mosquitoes batting
at the lanterns, an assortment of insect life drowning on the
surface of the pool. Very warm out, even that late. I wrote a
poem about the moon. I’m sorry to say I rhymed “moon”
with “raccoon.” The poem wasn’t much good. Nevertheless
I informed my parents that I’d become a poet. I revised
that one in the sixth grade. I changed “raccoon” to
“silver spoon,” a modest improvement.
BH: So you knew you were a poet by the time you
were nine. Did that awareness stay with you?
SL: By age fourteen, I wasn’t
so sure. I stopped writing during my teen years—too busy
being unhappy. I was living in Berkeley then. I began writing
again around eighteen, in Fresno. From the high Sierras, in a
place so sparsely populated it didn’t even qualify as a
town, to Fresno. I must thrive in desolate landscapes. And now
I live and write in Los Angeles. See, nothing’s changed.
BH: Except now you’re a respected poet. What was
your experience like in Fresno?
SL: My very first teacher at FSU was
a poet names Ingrid Salisbury, now Ingrid Wendt, and thank god
I landed with her, because she helped me get past the most embarrassing
stage of my poetic evolution. When I got to Philip Levine, then,
I wasn’t quite as bad. I mean I was bad, but glimmers of
promise had started to show up. Phil gave me great support and
very useful guidance. Later, I heard people say he was one of
the toughest poetry teachers in the business, but I liked that
toughness. Then I studied with Peter Everwine and Charles Hanzlicek.
The three were good individually, but also good in combination,
since each of these teachers had different strengths.
BH: That switchblade intensity you always seem
to go for in your poetry—did you learn that from Plath?
SL: Oh yes indeed, one can find more
than a trace of her. I remember the first poem of hers I came
upon—I’d have been eighteen—“Lady Lazarus,”
with its brittle language and scalding tone. It staggered me.
I saw right off she’d cracked the alchemical secret, how
to fuse words into an electrical conductor, how to make language
spark and transmit voltage. I guess that spoke to the orneriness
in me. I don’t remember if I knew then the more sensational
aspects of her life story. It was the language itself that fascinated.
You see, the poetry of the Fresno sensibility contains a kind
of tenderness and deep humanity. Even when the poems rise from
anger, or address anger, like “They Feed They Lion,”
the fury has about it something noble, because it responds to
social injustice. There’s also a way in which those poems
aspire to dive down towards some essential truth.
And that’s good. But suddenly into my literary landscape
comes “Lady Lazarus,” with a speaker one might think
languishes in a hapless, passive position but who instead pits
against her circumstances a voice that forgives nothing, that
is stripped of all self-pity, that mocks and jeers and burns.
A voice that did not expect to be liked.
Also, I sensed a different relationship with the idea of truth.
This poet did not so much explore as exert extreme will. She harnessed
pure will and command of the language to convert our understanding
of the scene we were witnessing. The figure lies in a hospital
bed surrounded by onlookers, but everything in the searing language
and clipped pacing defies our notions of the poet-as-victim. The
speaker won’t permit it, and by the way, I just hate like
anything about this cult out there who would have us believe she
was a victim of Ted Hughes. You know Hughes did a pretty good
job with Ariel. This man suffered terribly and was a
remarkable poet in his own right. He folded into her final manuscript
“Poppies in July” and other provocative poems which
she’d written after she assembled the Ariel Manuscript.
He actually ended it on a more complex, less pat, rather darker
mood than she’d earlier imagined. He took care of that book,
got it out there in a way that absolutely helped make her name.
And, oh, I can’t stand the doctrinaire notions of certain
pious busybodies who wag their fingers, tsk-tsk-tsk, without understanding
the complex nature of emotional illness and suicide.
BH: Not only is the psyche complex, so is the
persona—and biography, which is always subjective and often
blatant gossip. It’s especially dangerous to make assumptions
based on what you can glean from a poet’s writing. Your
writing, for instance. You mentioned growing up in the mountains,
not having TV or movies. That’s interesting to me, because
one would assume then that you would naturally develop as a nature
poet, yet your poetry, more than that of just about anyone I can
think of, is almost exclusively urban. The ‘nature’
in your poems functions like structural concrete, or maybe Hollywood
props.
Speaking of Hollywood—lately you’ve been studying
film noir. Many of your poems already have that tone. Will your
poetry become even more noir, and if so, will you be writing more
persona poems?
SL: Oh yeah, more of both, I hope. Actually,
my poems got noirish because my life turned noirish. Also, noir
is steeped in a particular urban sensibility—gritty downscale
urban—which just resonated with me…Well, the greatest
of noir films, “Double Indemnity,” involved the affluent
class, but most explore the underside of the city.
Even more to the point, some of my poems have to do with violence,
street violence. But not all writing that undertakes to look at
violence is noir. I think noir can be identified by a certain
voice, and a certain stance.
BH: And it’s that heightened particularized
voice and stance that make any good persona poems zing.
SL: I will always write persona poems.
I adore them, when they work. They give voice to the silent parts
of oneself. They are both objective and distanced, yet oddly personal.
It’s a wonderful form.
BH: Being the daughter of a Secret Service agent surely
must have colored your vision of life.
SL: This is such a big question because,
as you know, my father just died, at age ninety-seven. Actually,
what probably colored my vision of life, in some kind of way,
was having this particular father—in his prime a powerful
presence and an extremely charismatic personality. He was to the
end, actually. In his last days in the hospital, when he barely
had strength to speak, his attending nurse was positively charmed
by him.
Not long after I was born, he retired from the Secret Service
and joined the Foreign Service. His task was to set up an office
in Palermo that would research the backgrounds of those applying
for Visas, so as to prevent Mafia people from coming to the U.S.
Later, he sometimes joked, “Apparently I didn’t do
a very good job.” We lived there until I was almost five,
which may help explain a poem that shows up near the end of In
Danger, the one called “Palermo.” I don’t
write childhood poems as a rule, but I did want to catch the one
dreamlike memory.
My mother, who died in ‘98, was a remarkable woman also,
although her personality was subtler. She met my father in the
Secret Service, the third woman ever to be hired—in a position
that’s now called ‘Administrative Assistant’—shortly
after the war began, when men were in short supply.
BH: Our families have a tremendous impact on
us as poets, even if they’re not physically present at the
time we’re writing.Earlier you mentioned Hughes helping
to make Plath’s name. This ‘making it’ in the
poetry world is complicated. There are excellent poets who become
well known, and there are mediocre poets who somehow ingratiate
themselves or manipulate people and/or circumstances to achieve
the status of ‘celebrity poet.’ Does ‘making
it’ as a poet really have to involve such aggressive self-promotion?
Isn’t that bad for the poet’s ego, or soul, not to
mention poetry?
SL: What?! You mean…!? There are
famous and acclaimed poets out there whose work falls short of
remarkable?! I’m shocked. Actually, you just forged ahead
into the prickliest of terrains. Brave you. I think this: In today’s
jam-packed poetry monde it sure does seem that a poet has to work
awfully hard to be heard, or to make an impression. And without
a doubt this means some marvelous poetry out there is escaping
our attention. Emily Dickinson would not have fared well in today’s
marketplace. And what’s sadder still, if some unknown genius
like Dickinson left behind a thousand-something little compositions
that had the power and originality to advance the art, they’d
disappear without a trace. Publishers have a hard enough time
selling poetry as is without taking on an unknown, unpublished
dead poet. Who’d do the publication readings and signings,
which is where most poets make their sales? But as for mediocre
poets achieving tremendous recognition, this is not just a problem
in our particular field. It’s a function of an unjust world,
or maybe I should say a world that’s only fitfully, unpredictably,
and all too rarely just. It’s no better in Hollywood, in
the acting scene. And I don’t even want to think about what
visual artists have to put up with. I feel each poet must find
a way to come to grips with this fact—that success doesn’t
always come only to those who seem most deserving—or one
could go nuts. Or become embittered. And bitterness is the artist’s
great enemy. It will destroy you.
BH: Readings have become an expected part of
a poet’s repertoire. You not only give readings, as a member
of Nearly Fatal Women you’re involved in poetry performance.
How important should readings be, do you think? And should we
expect a reading by, say, a famous poet who commands big bucks
to be engaging as performance, or is it enough to witness the
poet presenting his or her poems?
SL: A famous poet who commands big bucks
had better make a good faith effort to give the best reading he/she
can deliver, or I will be quite annoyed. A few others might too.
A good faith effort involves these two points of endeavor: 1)
To serve the poem, to give the poem as honest, and affecting,
an interpretation as one can. And for god’s sake, to try
to remember why the hell one wrote the poem in the first place,
because after multiple readings some poets seem to have forgotten.
2) To make a connection with the audience, to acknowledge and
engage them as best one can.
BH: Which for me includes not reciting poetry
in Latin! What about poets who simple don’t read well?
SL: Most poets, even those who are naturally
shy, do make an effort—and I think the audience appreciates
the effort, even if the presentation falls short of electrifying.
Poetry audiences tend to be very forgiving. On occasions, though,
I’ve suffered through poets who get up in front of a group,
then make no attempt to summon from themselves any life energy
whatsoever. Those poets should just go home. Go home and lie down.
They shouldn’t be exerting themselves by standing.
BH: Most poetry books are sold at readings and signings,
or rather because of them. And if you do a reading and nobody
shows up, it’s still good to do, because your name gets
in the bookstore’s newsletter and your book gets prominently
displayed, often at the front of the store—placement the
major publishers pay quite a bit for. Given this, do you think
it’s irresponsible for a poet to not do readings?
SL: Not at all. It’s a break from
the standard procedure, but if anything that might be considered
a rather bold position to take. I know you don’t like to
read. No matter. Perhaps a whole mystique will spring up around
you.
BH: Don’t I wish. I was intrigued by your
comment in my class about L.A. poets being “rebel poets.”
SL: Did I actually say “rebel
poets”? Well, that makes us sound…really really interesting.
I think I might have said a number of smart, well-schooled poets
in L.A. actually have a sort of rebel stance, a kind of iconoclastic
attitude toward the larger literary world, and maybe toward the
world in general. And it’s not just a pose; it plays out
in the writing in all kinds of unpredictable ways. These are not
slam poets, youth culture poets, coffee house poets. They’re
literary poets with a boldness, or energy, or a mischievous humor.
BH: More so than elsewhere?
SL: I think so. And I can imagine possible
cultural and geographic reasons for this. Historically, the New
York literary world has ignored L.A., or openly scorned it, and
it’s only in recent years that San Francisco’s become
friendly, in large part because of Poetry Flash. So some poets
here developed a certain brand of self-sufficiency, and a humor
that can be both mocking and self-mocking—psychic survival
tactics. They’ve influenced the poetry for the better. I
think it’s for the better, anyway—and I sure do hear
a lot of out-of-towners tell me, in a very favorable context,
that there’s something indescribably different about the
tenor of much L.A. based poetry.
BH: You’d think that poets, at least, would
be above regional snobbishness. Luckily, regardless of what the
East Coast might think, California is quite obviously the home
of many literary masters and many, many excellent poets of every
school.
SL: And there are also East Coast people
like David Lehman out in New York who are interested in good poetry
wherever it comes from, so we don’t want to stereotype the
East any more than we want them to stereotype us.
BH: Good point. Suzanne, thank you for so generously
offering insights into your art and process. I for one am eagerly
looking forward to your next book.
SL: So am I. Thanks for helping to carry
the burning torch.
Beth Houston’s two most recent books of poems are Angels
in Exile and Exothermic Reaction; she teaches Creative
Writing at the University of Central Florida. When this interview
took place, she was teaching a class at UC Extension that invited
guest poets to speak, including Suzanne Lummis.
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