Eighty Milliseconds in the Past: A Conversation With Claire Bateman
Emrys Press Editor and Publisher Arthur McMaster interviewed Greenville poet and visual artist Claire Bateman on Oct 20, 2017
Arthur McMaster: Claire, if we might begin by my asking you about your influences as a poet — whom do you credit for bringing you to poetry and to writing poetry?
Claire Bateman: My parents were big readers, my mother of literature (quoted Auden and Eliot at random moments) and my father of history. My father also worked with photography and collage, and my mother wrote short stories and was a dedicated diarist. My paternal grandmother was the author of a book called The Wicked Goldsmith, a re-telling of legends from ancient India, including portions of the Ramayana and the Mahabarata. I grew up with those stories, and some of the images and illustrations stuck with me — the braceleted arm of the goddess Parvati rising from the lotus pool, for instance. I remember feeling as a small pre-literate person that reading must be an extremely important activity, and begging to be taught how, with the assumption that it would take only a few minutes. In fact, when I reached school age, I had trouble learning. Maybe that’s why I still remember the actual moment reading clicked in for me after months of struggle; the words and sentences became clear to me all at once, and from then on I read constantly.
I wrote off and on — stories and poems — during my growing up years, working on the literary magazine in high school and majoring in English at Kenyon College. In my twenties I started focusing on poetry more seriously, but I was trying to write like the great modernists, without any sense of the writing community that could actually be available to me.
It wasn’t until about 1984 when I was living in Wisconsin that I came in contact with contemporary poetry through Woodland Pattern, a Milwaukee bookstore specializing in collections from independent presses. That was where I bought my first contemporary anthology, New American Poets of the 80’s, edited by Jack Myers and Roger Weingarten (who turned out to be two of my teachers in grad school — the brilliant David Rivard as well), and it was as much a moment of turning as that first moment when I suddenly began to read fluently. Encountering the poets in the anthology, I felt a sense of recognition, the release of thought and speech as I saw that I didn’t have to restrict myself to the realm of high rhetoric and ironically formal and allusive constructs. I still feel a fondness for that book, with its rather dismal 80’s cover. Jon Anderson, David St. John, Susan Mitchell, Patiann Rogers, Denis Johnson, Jorie Graham, Albert Goldbarth, Mark Doty, Norman Dubie, Naomi Shihab Nye…these were the voices that imprinted me. I went on to work with other wonderful poets — Dave Smith, Margaret Gibson, Greg Donovan (all in Richmond at the time), and Ron Moran at Clemson. The Vermont College MFA program expanded my exposure to living writers. I should also mention that The Twilight Zone and the original Star Trek were just as formative.
AM: Do you think you actually write like any of them?
CB: I don’t know how I could evaluate that with objectivity, but I’d be honored to write like any or all of them. I aim for Susan Mitchell’s lushness, Norman Dubie’s richness of voice via his personae, Albert Goldbarth’s everythingness, and so on. I also love Louise Gluck’s “dazzle shots” (to steal the poet and critic Renee Ashley’s term) and Anne Carson’s astringent genius. I suspect I’ve absorbed various aspects of moods, tonalities, inflections, modulations, ways of phrasing, positing, and questioning…I think every writer does this. The material is internally transformed, one hopes, “into something rich and strange.”
AM: You now have as I recall eight volumes of poetry and several significant writing awards from your published work, including two Pushcarts. Truly an impressive career. Are you trying to go in any different directions, or pushing any boundaries you are conscious of? In other words, what challenges lie ahead?
CB: Having taken Ed Madden’s class on writing from marginalia and texts that are already in the world, I’ve been creating centos or what I think of as “recombinants” — that is, I’m extracting portions of various tangentially related texts and stitching them together. This is how the project started: a phrase in Darwin’s The Origin of Species (“Natural Selection…can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps”) made me think immediately of Paradise Lost (Adam and Eve cast out of Paradise: “They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,/ Through Eden took their solitary way”). I thought it would be interesting to set the two works resonating with and against each other. Then I added in George Eliot’s Gothic story The Lifted Veil, published the same year as The Origin of Species — I’m using portions of her letters and journals too, as well as Darwin’s — and the Book of Ecclesiastes and Charles Kingsley’s fairy tale, The Water Babies, which was in part a response to Darwin and various aspects of the natural science of the time. (Darwin, in fact, is said to have enjoyed it.) I find Darwin intriguingly poetic in stretches, though Karl Marx complained about his “clumsy English style” and George Eliot herself said of The Origin of Species, “Though full of interesting matter, it is not impressive for want of luminous and orderly presentation.” In all of these texts, there’s a deep sense of humanness, of soul, that transcends the differences between them, and the music of this is what I’m playing with. I’m also working with Sarah Blackman on a YA novel that we’re writing together, and some poems as usual, and some longer poetic projects that are still at the jinxable stage, so I can’t really talk about them.
AM: Your work is eclectic and highly erudite. I have in mind several from your latest book Scape, such as the oh so droll “Roll Call,” where you invoke Russian lit and the Peloponnesian Wars. How do such ideas come to you — are you perhaps a note taker, where a poem may begin from something you are reading?
CB: I do keep journals of things that strike me when I read, of ideas and images of various kinds, words that roll around in my head, etc. so that when I sit down to write, these brief floating unconnected things are all available to me.
It was when I began to work with a journal that my writing started to move away from simple subject-driven narratives (not that there’s anything wrong with those!) toward more complexity. Now my writing process is incremental, inductive, mostly hunch and accretion, and it’s about trusting the fragments and aiming toward collage in hopes that the whole will become greater than the sum of its parts.
The psychiatrist and writer Leslie H. Farber posited that every state falls into one of two realms of life — “the realm of states that that can’t be willed, and the realm of those that can,” and claimed that “the problem of the will lies in our recurring temptation to apply the will of the second realm to those portions of life that not only will not comply, but that will become distorted under such coercion.” According to Faber, “I can will knowledge, but not wisdom; going to bed, but not sleeping; eating, but not hunger; meekness, but not humility; scrupulosity, but not virtue; self-assertion or bravado, but not courage; lust, but not love; commiseration, but not sympathy; congratulations, but not admiration; religiosity, but not faith; reading, but not understanding…[;] speech or silence, but not conversation.” What does this have to do with writing? I believe that you can’t access merely by force of will the deep powerful writing we all want to do, but you can will paying attention to the world and to your own fleeting thoughts and impressions in order to jot them down in a journal, and you can will playful engagement and experimental exercises with those words and images — doing so often opens the door to that deeper kind of work.
In writing, it feels as though we’re trying to do the impossible — to move from nothing to something — that’s why the blank screen or page can seem so intimidating at times, and the edict to make it new so daunting. But as Michael North points out in his book Novelty: A History of the New, in art, culture, and nature, novelty arises not from nothing but through various kinds of recurrence and recombination.
When you keep a creative journal filled with fragments, overheard bits of conversation, observations, reflections, speculations, questions, rambling discourses and rants, night dreams and daydreams, anecdotes, word games, early and late drafts, thought experiments, Ouilipian exercises, descriptions, findings from research into whatever interests you, quotations, sketches, doodles, contextless words, phrases, images and ideas that move through your mind, then you don’t have to start from nothing — you have a lot of material to look through, and any component can serve as a protocrystal that becomes a nucleation site — or to change the metaphor, you can see which ones might belong together in the soup. Journal play represents the power of destabilization, the nonlinear dynamics of chaos theory, asynchronicity. J.D. McClatchy wrote, “The bowerbird in me is forever collecting colored threads and mirror shards to make a world.” And according to James Richardson, “Every life is allocated one hundred seconds of genius. They might be enough, if we could just be sure which ones they are.” Those hundred seconds are there in pieces across various journal pages for the writer to gather and assemble.
Theodore Roethke used to go through his journal every year and get rid of what no longer seemed to spark for him; I keep everything and comb through my most recent journals for particular writing projects, circling or starring in colored marker what seem to be relevant notations — sometimes I’ll make a list or index of these, with page numbers for reference. It’s a very unwieldy process, but it can be fruitful.
The Poet’s Notebook (Kuusisto and Tall, editors) is a wonderful resource, also Olivia Dresher’s In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing. On the art side, there’s Jennifer New’s Drawing from Life: The Journal as Art.
And as for that line you mentioned — it’s not that I’d been thinking about or researching the Peloponnesian Wars, and it’s not even that they’re fixed in my understanding historically — instead, they popped up from the place in my brain where all the loose fragments float around, and seemed appropriate for that point in the poem.
AM: Can you speak to the confluence in your poems, or in those whose work you love, of the narrative and the lyrical? Some people such as the late Thomas Lux do both, but not all can do this melding at all well.
CB: According to scientists, what we experience as the present is really eighty milliseconds in the past; it could be that the narrative impulse is laboring to bridge that gap while the lyric impulse is striving to dive into it.
But actually, to some extent, I’m inclined to go along with Michael Theune, who’s in favor of shifting the paradigm. In his essay “Against Narrative,” he writes, “Though turning is more vital to poetry than narrative, many conversations about poetry still use the language of narrative — ‘narrative,’ ‘plot’ — to discuss what really are (or could more accurately be described as) turns.”
However one frames the distinction, though, at this point in my life with poetry, I tend to use narrative elements mostly to support mutations in tone or philosophical/emotional stance in the service of lyric play and magic.
Alice Fulton says that poetry “requires no conflict or characters, no argument or point. It’s inherently oblique, but its reticence is mysterious and beautiful…Poetry makes the most complex and musical use of language.” I wouldn’t necessarily make that case in such an absolute way, yet I see what she’s getting at, and I’m always happy when I can manage to write something that I don’t wholly understand.
I do love to read poems with a strong narrative component. David St. John’s classic “The Man in the Yellow Gloves” comes immediately to mind, for instance — lyric and narrative are perfectly interwoven.
AM: What do you value most in a good poem — yours or I suppose anyone else’s — clever tropes, startling imagery, sonics, tension? I guess I am asking what makes the best loved poems?
CB: All of the above — and turns, surprise, imagination — whatever combination works to give me that “direct hit!” sensation, even if it takes some time to achieve it; this can occur just as gloriously in a long talky work like William Stafford’s “The Rescued Year” as it does in Emily Dickinson’s searing bursts. I think I’m speaking about both grace and magic, which overflow the elements of poetry’s design.
AM: You told me once that you do not do “formal” poems all that well. Do you enjoy reading poems in form, or does it all strike you as perhaps too predictable and ponderous? I would just follow up with the observation that so-called Neo-Formalists, such as Dana Gioia, Molly Peacock, and Mary Jo Salter seem to have robust followings. Is there sub-textual dialogue among so-called narrative free verse, poetry in form, and such post-mod business as “L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry?”
CB: Yes, I see that subtext. I do enjoy formal poems, and occasionally write them, and may work more with them, especially when I might feel stuck, which could happen at any time, but currently I’m grateful to have projects and potential projects overflowing. I’m aware of, and delighted by, the phenomenal range in poetry today — I’m just as happy about the upsurge in hybridity as I am about the increasing divergence of expressions. In his essay “Apples and Orangutans: Competing Values in Contemporary Poetry,” Charles Harper Webb remarks that “it should be noted that poets in the United States today may have no more in common than Montana fly-fishermen have with Antarctic gill-netters. People come to poetry wanting, needing, demanding very different and frequently incompatible things. What is praised in one quarter is sure to be vilified in another, and its opposite praised.” I see that as an asset, not a dilemma.
In fact, there’s so much fine poetry out there that it probably isn’t possible to keep up with it all. Just tonight in only a few minutes on the internet I came across two poems I’d never seen before that were equally shockingly wonderful yet very different from each other in tone and structure, etc.: Lauren Michelle Jackson’s “blue” and Kathryn Nuernberger’s “Zoontological Sublime.” Go look them up!
AM: You are also a visual artist of remarkable talent. I think we would love to have some of your paintings for our Emrys cover art soon. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for instance, wrote many poems taken from his drawings and paintings. In your situation, does one gift inform the other?
CB: The visual art is mostly non-conceptual, the closest I can come to pure lyricism. Whenever I can get away with it, I don’t even title my art. Both my writing process and my art process tend to be layered and untidy, like a laboratory with body parts lying around. When writing isn’t going well, I turn to art, and vice versa, and when both are going well, I have them in progress simultaneously, which makes for a lot of clutter. I’m very aware of how far I have to go, how much I have to learn, and how slow the progress is, how limited the time (in existential terms!).
AM: You have been writing and teaching in Greenville for many years. Does living in the South affect your writing? Do its peculiar manifestations, its ethos, show up in your work? Neruda wrote love poems, poems of place, and many highly political poems. More recently, the influential New York poet and editor David Lehman advises the poet to stay away from politics. Can the artist do so? What are your thoughts on poetry as protest?
CB: Most of my poems about the South showed up in my first book, The Bicycle Slow Race, when the South was new to me, and I was agog. (I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, which didn’t feel all that Southern.) I was living in Tidewater, Virginia, enthralled by the land.
I love the foliage, mountains and water of South Carolina, too — I practically live on my porch so I can be amid greenness as much as possible — and I’m delighted that fine writers like Drew Lanham and John Lane write about it, but for some inexplicable reason place doesn’t often tend to spark poetry in me. (“To People Sitting Motionless in Their Vehicles” in Scape, and “Where We Crossed Over” in At the Funeral of the Ether — about Tennessee — are exceptions).
As for political poems, I believe they’re necessary, especially now, but it takes a particular gift to make them charged/prophetic rather than leaden/didactic, and I don’t think I have that, though I honor those who do. We desperately need the many poets that are speaking in these fraught times. Where would we be without Terrance Hayes’ “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” for instance? — or Dean Rader’s “America I Do Not Call Your Name Without Hope”: “It is a song of flame but not for burning./ It is a song out of breath but a plea for breathing…”
AM: Thank you, Claire.
CB: Thank you, Arthur.
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