An Interview with Terese Svoboda: Poetry on Occupations and Pre-Occupations

Beats  |  Terese Svoboda, Dec-Feb 2010

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HELO: Thank you very much for joining HELO Magazine for this talk. That show at the Gerschwin Hotel was quite an adventure. How did that evolve?

Terese: It was an adventure for me too. I was contacted by K. Page Stuart of The Sleepwalkers Parade who organizes it. She asked me whether I’d heard of a group that I might collaborate with. I’d just heard this terrific band the night before, a big brass band but after some consideration, I decided brass wasn’t really appropriate for poetry—the words need to be heard.

She suggested Skye Steele’s band because he does jazz violin and the violin mimics the human voice on some level. Skye read my work and had a lot of good ideas. [K Page] does these collaborations at least once a year. It was an idea that evolved out of a residency that she had at the Atlantic Center for the Arts with Cornelius Eady, who has done theatrical things with poetry before.

HELO: You’ve been doing a good deal of readings like that.

Terese: I’ve done lots of live readings, but none with music. It was an experience for me. We’d done just one rehearsal and that was only with the violin so the result was exciting.

HELO: It worked really well. It fit perfectly. I thought that you’d been doing that for a while.

Terese: [Laughs] Good.

HELO: Weapons Grade, you said, was about occupations and pre-occupations. It’s somewhat political. Do you find that you write editorially, to argue a point, or more to stimulate thought even if the reader comes to a different conclusion than you?

Terese: Poetry--and art in general--have to avoid being didactic. You can start with an emotional response to an issue and then the information that is included in the work may point toward one bias or another. But not the main thrust. I never write to persuade anyone. I just write in response to what I see.

HELO: Taking an example like “The Convoy Never Moves.” Some people might think it’s a poem written to protest an occupation like Iraq’s. How does a poem like that originate for you?

Terese: Well, that one was without the epigraph for a long time, but after I added it, the poem was much more politicized. It was a quote from Barbara Bush on Good Morning America, about why should she waste her beautiful mind on things like body bags and death. If you read the poem without it, the only thing vaguely political is the word “convoy” and the fact that the people in it are dead. I like to think that the beauty of the poem itself transcends the political. Take Yeats’ work, like the poem, “Easter, 1916.” The beauty of its refrain—“changed, changed utterly” moves the poem beyond an eulogy of those who were executed after the Irish Rebellion.

HELO: Would you say then that your poetry is a cathartic expression, not necessarily casting judgment?

Terese: Yes, that’s right. Anytime you pass a judgment you’re going to alienate a reader because someone’s going to have either a different idea or completely disagree with you and then put it aside as an invalid piece of art.

HELO: That’s the political. What about the pre-occupations you explore in your new book, Weapons Grade?

Terese: Actually, there’s only those two Yeatsian pre-occupations—sex and death—and everything else derives from that.

HELO: Do you tend to write or construct your poems as they flow or do you have carefully shaped devices and rhythms with which you construct the work?

Terese: Many of the poems in this book have formal constraints in rhyme or line like sonnets, even a sestina. But all of them began without them, and then I gave them shape depending on how they developed. I always write work out on paper before I put them on the computer and sometimes the shape of the paper or the direction of my writing makes a difference in terms of the length of lines. I should use adding machine tape!

HELO: That’s really interesting. I identify with that, how by writing by hand you’re coming from a natural point. Does anything get lost in that transition once it goes into production?

Terese: I’m sure people who worked on stone tablets or with quills faced similar losses. [Soft laugh] Writing by hand forces me to slow down and consider the words singly. I’m a very fast typist, so when I transcribe it, there’s another rhythm involved. This may not be true for the next generation who seldom write anything down. I then print and make a lot of changes onscreen. When I get really stuck and can’t sort out what I’m aiming for, I’ll write the whole thing out by hand again.

HELO: A lot of our readers will identify with that. A few years back you were in South Sudan?

Terese: A long time ago [for a brief time during] a tiny little truce of three years. I was part of the National Anthropological Film Center’s effort to document disappearing cultures, an activity that was felt to be important in the ‘70s and ‘80s. In 1968 the man I was with made a film with Hillary Harris for the Harvard Film Studies Center called “The Nuer,” a classic ethnography capturing Evans Pritchards’ work on these people. Later they discovered that they had not included the influence of women in this ninety minute feature, so we went back to do that. I also had a grant from PEN as a translator, given to me with the belief that a poet was a better translator than a linguist. I collected Nuer songs by hiring someone to separate the sounds we had taped into distinguishable words, then he would give me a loose idea what they meant. Eventually the work became Clean the Crocodile’s Teeth: Nuer Song. It’s the only collection of their literary work. Because they move from place to place seasonally. they have no other art form--as in many other cultures in sub-Saharan Africa. We began work in Gambela, on the Ethiopian side and then we went to Khartoum in the Sudan and then down to Juba, Nasir, Malakal, Fangak, and a couple other places, mostly walking or by dugout.    

HELO: What surprised you when you got there, things you didn’t expect?

Terese: [Laughs] It was like landing on the moon. Being in a completely different culture, surrounded by people completely different from me, with different aspirations and different technologies. On top of that, the area was severely wartorn. The experience was very profound, like starting life over. We lived as they lived. It was the ethnographic filmmaking technique at the time. I had to adjust to one meal a day and living in a circular house with many other people. I remember trying to write up my notes leaning against the top of a thatched roof after walking a mile from my house. I had to get away from people to remember what I wanted to write. Everyone thought I was ill.

HELO: Lindsay Stark, one of the photographers who’s contributing, she did the cover photo [for issue II]. She was just in Gambela a couple weeks ago for her other work. And we’re hoping to do a story on the Nuer and Merle pretty soon, so we’ll try to link it to your interview.

Terese: That would be very timely considering that they’re being plunged back into civil war again.

HELO: And it’s often not high politics, but just feuding between local groups that creates the space for the higher political problems to get worse.

Terese: When I was there, the fighting was more traditional. Two groups of young guys would meet in a clearing and they’d use clubs to fight, not machine guns. Afterwards, there’d just be a few cracked heads like after a football game and that would be that.

HELO: Now you’re going to be working with the Afghan Women Writers’ Network?

Terese: I’m looking forward to it. I met Masha Hamilton, the woman who’s running it, many years ago at a writer’s conference. She organized The Camel Bookmobile in Kenya, a fabulous project and then a great book, and then went on to work in Afghanistan. She invited me to be one of her online teachers for the Afghan women who have access to computers.

It’s rather dangerous work from their end. The results of the workshop will be posted on the website for comments between other Afghan women and American writers. I’ll only teach for three weeks.

HELO: How are they working with security for the women who participate?

Terese: Using pseudonyms and taking care that locations are not exact in the stories. Masha is trying to raise money so they can have computers at home because they have to be accompanied by a man every time they go out to an internet cafe. It’s a big issue.

HELO: Have you done more work like that in Sudan and with Afghans?

Terese: I’ve traveled abroad on various scientific projects since Sudan, but there’s something about having kids that slows you down in that regard. The humanitarian work tends to be more domestic [soft laugh]. I have plenty of humility with regard to anyone making these efforts. It’s really difficult.

HELO: You’re originally from Nebraska? What’s it like out there for lyrical artists, literary types, poets?

Terese: “You can’t go home again,” I say. I’ll be publishing my thirteenth book soon and the first time I had any coverage in Nebraska was a couple of weeks ago. It’s very hard to make an impact there so I don’t really expect to anymore. [Laughs] You know, you really have to die and then they consecrate your house. Or you have to be from somewhere else, Virginia, like Willa Cather, and then you’re alright. The major cultural activity in Nebraska is football, I’m afraid.

However, my uncle was a poet so I guess I saw that that writing seriously could be done. My mother was very involved in the arts. She painted until she had her fifth child, and taught art. My parents used to discuss Great Books at home. On a strictly familial level the influences were good, tremendous, but other than that, if you want to get a laugh there, you tell people you’re a poet.

[Laughs]

HELO: Some writers and artists might be propelled by spite or by that tension.

Terese: Whenever they said I couldn’t do something I’d go and do it.

HELO: Now you’ve come out with your book, Weapons Grade. If some of our readers travel out to the boonies and can only take so many books with them, why should they choose this one?

Terese: [Laughs] It tries to address the concept of occupations from the Japanese to the Iraqi to the Spanish to Ireland, as well as a wide spectrum of twentieth century occupations. Sex and death is something you think about in those out-of-the-way places, believe me. Since the poetry is sophisticated, sometimes it requires that it be read more than once. It’s like getting a five-hundred page work condensed down to two hundred pages!

HELO: Who are some of your influences? If someone were curious, which writers might your work be categorized with?

Terese: I have people I admire. Auden, Yeats, Eliott. It’s always hard to single out contemporary influences—Caroline Knox is so interesting, Maureen Seaton, Paul Muldoon. I went to Kenya in June for the State Department, representing the International Writer’s Program in Iowa. We brought a server that had something like sixty thousand books on it to present to the head of the education department at the Somali refugee camp in Dadaab. Whoever chooses those works is quite powerful!

HELO: Did you get to consider the Somali issues? They have a really interesting oral history and lyrical storytelling tradition.

Terese: Yes, Somali women resolved a conflict mid-century by composing a song which convinced the men to stop fighting. That of course was a while ago, but shows that poetry in their culture is still very important. The history of their culture, like the Nuer’s, is contained within the memory of the people who remember. That’s why it’s so important that they hand it down. Should I read a poem?

“For They Know Not What They Do”

There are soldiers in mother’s hair

And soldiers peeling the screen.  

Distracted? I am driven.

I can’t stop this chattering

with history hissing its heat

Grave raincoat-shouldered people

with their own histories, bad

histories, drink to their bitterness

and chide us for our efforts.

What is there other than I forget?

I can’t read the papers or your face

on the phone. Give it up is the answer, is

is the answer, aghast is the hair.

The rains washed off most of our skin

How does it feel during a war?

A silence stirs.

This poem comes out of the experience in America of someone who is not at a battleground. How alienating it is both for a person who feels how terrible a war is but is so far away--and for those people facing it.

I could read one that’s in the pre-occupation area.

“Bi-Coastal”

Him in the sun is not fun.

Every day of mine is a white bit

of Kleenex, with not enough air

to float, Our son asks:

Is he back or forth?

I say, Dream him here.

A fog descends after his kickoff.

How much is memory? Twenty cents

he’s left on the bureau.

A month of cold phones, only food

children eat. My held breath is all

I’m counting up to.

Let the continent flex its bicep,

a man built on steroids. Absence

spreads--there’s nothing like presence.

“My Mature Style”

I light matches endlessly.

Paris burns!

The Eiffel Tower shoots blue gas!

The lighter I find in my pocket--

cold metal on a blue bruise--

ignites the biggest fires.

I get dogs and cats running,

I get affirmation in black.

My mother’s heart keeps on burning.

Mark the left ventricle her favorite,

its system so silent and skilled,

its blue, the blues of exchange.

HELO: Thank you very much. Hope to hear you read again soon!

Terese: Thank you!

www.Helo-Magazine.com

 

 

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Pieces of the Sky

Beats  |  Greg Fuchs, Oct-Nov 2009

[This poem is 1 of 2, please see below]

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The wind, the water

Washed my home,

My people away,

My people wash far

Away my home.

Pieces of the sky.

The wind, the water

Took my home

Into the lake.

Home so fleeting

The pieces of the sky.

The wind and the water

Biblical lesson.

The lake came to visit

The river. The lake

Came to my house.

The wind and the water

So fleeting,

Pieces of the sky.

 

 

End.

 

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Lazarus

Beats  |  Amitai Touval, Oct-Nov 2009

www.Helo-Magazine.com 

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I feel a bit guilty,

listening to the awkward voice

from the periphery,

its attempt to be included

in the grand machinations of money

at the core,

it touches my heart.

I have been secluded, shunned, abused

by an evil employer,

my serpent tongue was not admissible,

the venom I had was like honey,

and my conscious thoughts

were not malicious or injurious to clients.

 

I confess further that my language

was a parody and a farce,

a creepy and gruff attempt

at speech that was not my own.

I came from beyond,

admitted reluctantly,

ejected into the tumbleweeds

prairie of unemployment.

 

The toilet is the trumpet

of the damned

Dante turned it into art

the Inferno is the heart

that desires provenance

that is outside its reach.

Ambition succumbed to failure

beguiles the fool

and bags the cat,

swallowed by the fisher

one hot afternoon

in a summer home

away from home,

in the periphery of riches

where love evolves tenuously

without pause.

 

What was is listened to,

is never listened to with

gratitude.

Even if Christ is fraud

a terribly annoying heresy,

there is no doubting the message

love thy neighbor as you love thyself,

serve the spirit, not lucre,

and suffer the consequences of love

lest the devil foist you by your own

petard,

the cat swallowed the hare,

swallowed by the fisher,

one hot day,

one crazily hot day,

one day mortgaged from the sun.

 

The sun,

where doubt in Christ' efficacy

is well known and radiates

maddingly,

warming the heart that craves redemption,

but knows that greed had set its lure on

a soul vulnerable.

 

Malice took pity,

and the boss relented,

and dismissed the poor cad.

 

There is no knowledge of Trenton,

Harrison, or Camden, or Newark,

only of Madison Avenue and clients

festooned in oak-bedecked offices.

It is a shame Christ was born

so long ago.

We need him now,

we need him today,

this is an urgent call,

not for a whistleblower,

but the fire of St. John.

Baptize when it hurts,

bring the perjured party

to court a second time,

and dismiss the lawyer's cant

of double-jeopardy.

 

Keep always in mind,

the voice of the West African

poet, who sought a woman in CA,

a real estate mogul,

desired her so much,

that his email reached you,

beckoned you to see the other

face of humanity occluded from view,

grasping, not for love,

but in return,

he shall receive love, mercy,

and the gift of tolerance

and gratitude from the

unemployed in your land,

a land so prosperous it

sends its young to fight for oil,

a commodity to be had

through other market means.

 

Seal the words of the poor with wax,

do not oil the poll they shimmy.

Sun, life, be a friend,

providence is here,

in the pen, in the awareness,

that even if Christ the redeemer

was a bastard,

his message was not a fraud,

the Gospels are letters,

that we must heed to.

 

Take them into your heart,

repudiate their literal meaning,

and be saved in a manner so ordinary,

the subtle shall call you sublime,

and the poor African will resurrect

from the grave of Lazarus,

with kindness and fortitude.

 

 

HELO

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