POET OF THE WIND: AN INTERVIEW WITH LINDA HASSELSTROM
South Dakota Review: Do you think the bestowal of the Wrangler Award for Poetry by the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma is indicative of changing definitions regarding the scope and possibilities of contemporary Western literature?
Linda Hasselstrom: Definitely. The shift began, of
course, where everything begins in the West: with the land. As I’ve traveled
the West speaking and giving readings, I’ve sensed how ranchers have been
paying attention to the fact that more people are concerned about the
environment, and critical of the ways ranching operated in its early years. But
more importantly, many ranching families have been on the same land for more
than a hundred years, and by watching the land have observed how their actions
affect ground cover and wildlife. They know that the land must be healthy in
order to sustain cattle as well as wildlife, so they have been working to learn
how to do both as part of their profession. In the process, many of them
discover that they have much in common with people from other regions who have
been critical of us, and we all have much to learn from each other. Discussions
about the land have led, naturally, to literature which expresses these changing
attitudes. I’m a woman rancher who has been active in working to preserve a
healthy environment for both cattle and native species, and folks who hear me
discuss these ideas read my work, and see how these ideas are expressed in it.
Changing
Western attitudes—learning to acknowledge and discuss problems like not
talking to each other, being brutal to women and animals—has taken longer, but
it is happening. I see this award as encouraging evidence that Westerners are
acknowledging change, moving to accommodate new attitudes and ideas.
Unfortunately,
in regard to land use, many environmentalists are still stuck in the past,
accusing ranchers of errors most of them no longer make; worse yet, the
environmentalist attitude sometimes seems to suggest that ranchers deliberately
harm the land or wildlife, either for profit, or because they are inherently
evil.
Women
have always been part of the West, and women who remained and thrived have
usually been strong and forthright, though this was not evident to the
“outside” world—because the women doing the work were not writing about
themselves, or what they wrote was not being published outside the region.
So
this is another way that I have felt an obligation to attempt to speak for the
women who will not, or did not, write their own stories. This is risky business,
as I’ve discovered several times; if I don’t represent them in the way they
want to be represented, they let me know. I
also encourage them to speak for themselves.
SDR: In previous interviews you’ve spoken about the dichotomy that exists between the stereotyped “myth” of the West, as well as the subsequent backlash or trend to “debunk” this myth. How do you attempt to situate your own work between these two extremes, and, in particular, what are the ways in which you subvert stereotypical notions of a mythologized West in your own writing, while simultaneously capturing those qualities of the American West which are indeed imaginatively resonant?
LH: Humans seem to love extremes: black-white,
good-bad. It’s so much easier to say, “It’s all the fault of [fill in the
blank],” but nature doesn’t work that way. As I learned from my work on the
ranch, a rancher who shoots coyotes because they occasionally eat chickens is
killing an ally who hunts primarily mice and moles which destroy stored and
growing grain. I learned to try to understand the consequences of actions,
denying the old maxim “Shoot first and ask questions later.”
Hence,
the poem “Coyote Song.” And in order to drive home the lessons of
contradiction, even though I was writing with the iambic pentameter traditions
of cowboy poetry firmly in mind, I deliberately did not rhyme the poem, though
the lines have a strong rhythm reminiscent of a coyote’s loping gait.
When
I was working on Feels Like Far, my
New York editor suggested I take out all the women, and narrow the story to
“the conflict with your father.” This suggestion seemed to me to fit
precisely the errors of those who say either that the West was all myth and
it’s gone, or that it was all truth and it lives. My life with my father
wasn’t all conflict; he taught me the most important things I know about life
and ranching. Conversely, when he turned mean because he was in ill health, I
survived that episode in part because of all I had learned from the land and
other women about survival. Both sides of the story are true, even though they
may be contradictory.
SDR: Landscape, or geography, is, of course, a central theme or concern in your work, and you have stated the importance of fostering an intimate relationship with landscape. Along these lines, do you view your treatment of landscape, as well as your relationship to landscape, as being somewhat personified? In other words, do you perceive your writerly approach to landscape as being similar to the rendering of a fully developed character—a friend, lover, spouse, or relative, for example?
LH: Many writers have spoken of weather being so
important as to be almost a “character” in Western writing, and I regard the
land the same way. Like a human or an animal, the land is individual, with
quirks of personality that require one to be constantly alert to what it has to
teach. I think in my writing I have treated the landscape as all of these:
friend, lover, spouse, or relative, yet I’ve never been unaware that the land
is none of these, that it is indifferent to human efforts.
And I’ve been inspired by Mari Sandoz’ example; she said, “Through the discovery of this region, this one drop of water, I hope to discover something of the nature of the ocean.” The more I write about my own region, the people and animals and plants inhabiting it, the more I feel a kinship with the specifics of other regions.
SDR: Along similar lines, do you believe that landscape shapes and creates a writer’s sensibility, or is it the writerly sensibility which transforms a physical/geographical landscape into the resonantly imagined literary landscape?
LH: Probably both, in my case. I would not have been
who I am without having moved to the ranch; the ranch made me a writer because I
used writing and reading as tools to help me understand the land. Now my writing
is used as a guide by other people who are trying to adapt in real life to
similar landscape.
SDR: The way in which you employ language in your poetry seems to me rather elegant and spare, without a lot of ribbons and furbelows. In many respects, your poetry strikes me as being a “straight-talking” kind of poetry—a haunting plainsong, if you will, as opposed to an embellished coloratura aria. Do you feel that the austere aesthetic of the landscape you write about in any way influences your poetic language?
LH: Thank you. The
contrast between the language that is required in colleges and universities, and
the language I use (and you use) in poetry and essays is a conscious rebellion
against the elevated discourse of the university.
A
lot of factors influenced my decision to drop out of graduate school and return
to South Dakota, but I believe an underlying cause was my desire to return to
speaking clearly and without “furbelows” about important issues. The
language of my poetry and essays is not necessarily simpler, but I make a
conscious effort to make it more straightforward than the language used in most
professions which require a college degree. The differences may boil down to the
fact that if I am choosing between two words, I’m likely to pick the one with
metaphorical content, and fewer syllables.
While the contrast in language between the lives I lead as a rancher and poet and the life of a college professor might furnish material for humor, I made a choice in lifestyle that is central to who I am now. Most of the ranchers in my neighborhood don’t read anything I write, least of all my poetry. Most have a hearty, possibly well-founded, but certainly self-destructive distrust of anyone who has been to college. Still, when I write, I recall my father’s wry comment when I came back from my freshman year in college filled with my own self-importance and brilliance: “Don’t forget how to talk to ordinary people.” I want to write so that if my neighbors read my work, they will understand what I am saying; if they understand me, they may agree with me, and we may be able to preserve some of the best aspects of our ranching community’s heritage. So my choice of language is not merely an aesthetic, but a choice based on practicality, as are many of the choices I make in other aspects of my life.
A
poem that comes instantly to mind as an illustration of what I mean is
“Spring,” which I wrote as a repudiation of the kinds of poems I saw
then—in the early 1960s—as typical of those being published to honor “the
country.” I’d read a lot of poems around that time about spring in the
country, all sweet and benign, filled with white lambie-pies springing through
the green grass, little birdies building nests while singing their teensy weensy
beaks off. I set out to show the reality of spring in my working neighborhood,
even the truth about some of those birds. I have to be careful where I read that
poem to this day; some folks are sickened by it, or horrified.
But I was careful to write only what I had personally seen to be true. I
can identify where audience members live by their reactions to killing the
kittens: city people say we could take the kittens to a shelter, spay the
females. Country people know the shelters charge for each animal brought in, and
that cats we pay to spay are invariably eaten by coyotes, to be instantly
replaced by pregnant felines. We can’t afford to spay ‘em all.
And
those contrasts—trying to use the knowledge of people who really live in a
place, to educate people who do not, or who are “newcomers”—underlies much
of my later work.
To answer the second part of your question—or really, the question—yes, I think the “austere aesthetic of the landscape. . . influences” my poetic language. My home country is a place where if you talk too much while pitching hay to cows on a forty-below-zero morning, you’ll suffer from frostbite of the tongue. Conditions of our landscape, as well as long-established custom, make us people of few and well-chosen words. All of us tell stories of people who capture the kernel of a story in a phrase; I grew up learning to admire such folks, and emulating them in my writing is a kind of unspoken memorial.
SDR: One of the recurring elements I find in your poetry is a powerful and fascinating tension between pragmatism and empathy/compassion, particularly in poems such as “Spring,” which you’ve just discussed a bit in response to the previous question, “Butchering the Crippled Heifer,” “Roadkills and the I Ching,” or even “Bitter Creek Junction.” Is this a tension which is derived, in any way, from your own psyche or world view? Or is it any way a reflection of your dual roles and experiences as both rancher and poet?
LH: As a poet, I do not, and cannot, stop being a
rancher. This realization came as a shock to me when I finally realize I now own
the ranch. I can’t write pretty theories anymore; what I do, or do not do, on
that land influences everything that lives there. I don’t make the daily
choices I did when I was caring for the cattle. Then, if I left a cow out in the
pasture to calve, and she lost the calf, I had to wonder if I’d have saved it
if I’d brought her to the corral. Instead I make choices over the long term:
should I limit the number of cows my lessee can keep in this pasture? Shall I
prohibit a lessee from plowing up native grass? But every decision I make
affects the plants, the wildlife, the cattle, and all the humans (twelve, not
counting myself) who depend in part upon my land for their daily living.
So
I not only demand that this practicality is reflected in my own writing, poetry
and essays, but I look with a very critical eye on the theoretical
pronunciations of other “nature” writers. We know, in the West, that people
who write theoretically in places a long way from us sometimes make decisions we
have to live with—or fight to change.
To
speak specifically of the poems:
When I was on the ranch, I was often invited to come to town for a barbecue in some friend’s back yard—and advised to bring the meat, but not tell them what its name had been. I don’t think everyone ought to be required to butcher their own beef, anymore than I want everyone toting a gun, so I wrote “Butchering the Crippled Heifer,” so that meat-eaters might at least understand the experience by reading about it. Judging by reactions when I read it, I may have created vegetarians.
“Roadkills
and the I Ching” is a little embarrassing; I have not studied that ancient and
wise book of guidance, but used it only as a framework, challenging myself to
respond to those maxims, probably a distortion of the real meaning of the I
Ching. I was surprised by my conclusion, but it seemed to me correct: we
drive fast and blindly, and we kill animals, and in so doing, we are killing
ourselves; what we do to the earth, we do to ourselves. That’s an idea that is
now pretty prevalent in “nature” writing, but I hadn’t seen it when I
wrote the poem, and didn’t deliberately aim for that ending.
SDR: I’m frequently haunted by the presence of wind in your poems. Certainly, in your part of the country, wind is an omnipresent fact of life. Could you perhaps comment on the nature of wind in your poetry? Its role as adversary? As muse? As witness, or companion?
LH: It’s all of the above, though until I read your
question, I was not conscious of particularly emphasizing its role in my poems.
Wind is simply there, and must be accommodated, just as I have had to allow for
the spectacles on my face since I was ten years old. Come to think of it, I have
several unfinished poems in which wind plays a central role.
SDR: Can you describe your typical writing process when working on a poem, from initial genesis to final version?
LH: I consider my self-created job to be writing
prose about the ranching culture of my region, the arid High Plains. Poetry is
what I do for relaxation and entertainment. (I feel a bit sheepish about this,
knowing that for many people it is a profession practiced with great dedication,
but my view is not meant to denigrate the views of others.) Therefore, I usually
begin thinking about poems when I have blocks of time away from the distractions
of the “business” of writing—answering requests for essays, proofreading,
arranging speaking tours and the like, and away from the computer, the
telephone, and house-keeping. Most poems start as notes scribbled on a yellow
pad balanced on the passenger seat of my car as I drive somewhere to do a
reading or workshop.
When
I return home, I usually type the notes, or the draft, if I have worked on the
poem long enough to call it that, into a computer file. I print it out, and take
it with me the next time I have a block of uninterrupted time. I read the draft
before I start the car, and think about it while I drive. While I drive, my mind
wanders away from the poem—but sometimes this haphazard thinking results in
leaps, connections I wouldn’t make if I were sitting at a computer
concentrating on “writing a poem.” And sometimes, of course, when I look at
the notes again, nothing makes sense. Either way, I usually work on a poem for a
length of time ranging from a month or two to years and years and years. (I have
“current” drafts typed on yellowed paper fifteen years old.) So,
unfortunately, most of my work on poetry is in widely-separated bursts. When I
create a space of several days during which I can avoid—even more than I
usually do—the message apparatus of the modern world, I often work intensively
and exclusively on poetry. Sometimes I am astonished at what my subconscious has
accomplished while I have been attending to other matters. Much of Bitter
Creek Junction was completed during a summer when I spent much of my time at
the women’s writing retreat I direct at my ranch home, Windbreak House. I was
reading and commenting on drafts written by the women in residence—sometimes
late into the night—and then turning to my own poems. It was exhilarating;
made me wish I could do that more often. I am conscious of the irony in this
statement; the reason I can’t spend more time writing is because I have
achieved some success as a writer.
In
writing both prose and poetry, the final stages consist of eliminating
everything that does not advance what I have learned is the meaning of the
piece: deletion, carving it down to the least number of words that will do the
job.
But
when I finish an essay, I usually am doing so because someone has requested it,
or because I have decided where to submit it, or I immediately search out a
potential market. I never submit my poetry to magazines. A friend and wonderful
critic with whom I exchange work says that by not doing so, I am not fulfilling
the requirements of the craft, not allowing my work to be judged by my peers.
He’s probably right, and I feel guilty about that; good old Midwestern guilt
makes us accomplish so much! It takes me a long time to put a collection of
poems together, and when I do I simply let it sit there, re-reading the poems
when I have time, sometimes reading them in public and asking for feedback,
tinkering with the lines. So far, before I was quite ready to start thinking
about publication, I’ve found someone who was interested in doing a book. But
all of my publishers have functioned strongly as editors, goading me to work
until the poems were as good as I could make them. I realize this makes me,
among poets, very very lucky.
SDR: Which
elements of poetic craft concern or interest you most, personally, as a poet?
LH: Each poem presents different elements, different
problems to solve. I try to let the material suggest the form, but sometimes I
hear or read a particular writer, and try to create an effect in the same way he
or she has done, in order to understand both the poem and the method.
Most of all, I enjoy the challenge of finding the language that will say what the poem seems to want to communicate. As Diane Ackerman has said, “Each word is a small story, a thicket of meaning.” My office is crammed with dictionaries, books on the origins of words—for hours, I can be lost, or found—in the process of choosing the right word. The right word, in my opinion, is never the word most familiar because it is overused in conversation. I also loathe the use of what I call “therapy words” in poems even more than I abhor them used in conversation. Comments like, “I haven’t processed that idea yet because my inner child had issues with my outer menopausal woman” inspire in me a strong desire to regurgitate.
SDR: You’ve mentioned a certain fluidity in your creative process with regard to determining whether a specific topic/idea is best rendered as a poem or as an essay– using a process of trial-and-error, sometimes switching back and forth between genres, in order to find the right medium for a particular piece. In the end, what qualities, for you, finally separate the poetic impulse from prose writing? What is it that, in your mind, makes a poem a “poem”?
LH: I must quote again, because no one has expressed
the distinction better, in my opinion, than Donald Hall in
Poetry: The Unsayable Said
(Copper Canyon Press, 1993):
Anything
that can be thoroughly said in prose might as well be said in prose. . . . Poems
tell stories; poems recount ideas; but poems embody
feeling.
I
begin with a feeling, an observation—something not as complete as an idea. And
sometimes I know at once that what I have to say requires too much explanation
to be expressed only in metaphor, or short lines. I analyze the direction I
believe my thinking is going, and foresee disagreement, and feel I need prose to
discuss it thoroughly.
But
if the concept continues to move toward pictures, emotions, then I usually lean
toward poetry as a means of exploring it. As I have said, I don’t write poetry
about things I understand. Poems usually begin with puzzlement, a need for an
answer. Essays usually begin with a story, and as I explore the story, I begin
to understand its meaning.
Look
at the essay “Birth” [Land Circle,
p. 6-7], which began as a poem and simply got too long. But once I fell into the
dichotomy of birth and death, I felt the piece took on a truly poetic quality.
I
thought about calling it a “prose poem,” but there are folks who write those
for a living, and since I’m not at all sure what one is, I thought I’d
better call it prose. But I was reminded of a professor who suggested, in a
graduate school class, that Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” was
really a poem. I don’t care for the Hemingway story any more, I don’t know
if “Birth” could be regarded as a poem, and frankly, I don’t think very
much about that aspect of writing. I have sat absolutely entranced, listening to
scholars read papers analyzing my work. I respect people, like yourself, who
choose the job of studying and analyzing someone’s writing. But I’m only
interested in working out the problems I set myself by writing. This is probably
another reason I failed to complete my Ph.D.
SDR: Many of your poems are narrative poems. Do you feel that narrative has a specific function to perform within your poems?
LH: Sometimes a narrative seems the way to explore
the question the poem is asking me. Awhile back I began thinking of a period of
my life I find difficult to understand, even now—the years encompassing
graduate school, my first marriage, my first teaching experiences. I had chosen
a direction that took me away from the ranch, to the University of Missouri, and
I believed my departure was permanent. Now that I have committed myself to the
ranch, I find that period of my life hard to understand, but I know that then I
thought I was doing the right thing. I felt like a capable, modern career woman.
The intellectual challenges were terrific: I was teaching journalism in a
girls’ school, taking graduate courses for my MA and later my aborted Ph.D.,
trying to be a stepmother, exercising every practical skill I knew to support us
on little money, attending poetry readings and writing poetry, meeting new
people. So I’ve been going back to some poems I began at that time, looking
for something in them that could help me understand my own “story” of those
years, looking for something in all that elapsed time that I still value. Trying
to learn, perhaps, what elements of myself from those years still exist, or if I
strangled that woman in order to become the woman I am now.
In
so doing, I found the 1971 draft of a poem that became “Establishing Perpetual
Care at the Locust Grove Baptist Cemetery,” a poem I’ve never read aloud,
never submitted for publication. It is not a “Western” poem by the standards
most people use– but as I began to work on it, I became immersed in the
challenge of trying to make the poem conversational in tone while providing the
information the audience needs to understand the story. I’ve always admired
the ability of writers like William Stafford and William Kloefkorn to make poems
sound like a story told in conversation. Also, I’ve learned from reading my
work that conversational narrative poems draw even reluctant listeners into the
story. So I worked at trying to keep the lines from becoming bulky or too
prose-like. And of course as I tinkered, I re-discovered what I had learned from
the encounter with Walter Mathis (his real name), and how that knowledge fit
into the work I am doing now. The poem reminded me of a fact that’s important
in the prose work I do: that some of the qualities I admire in humans are not
exclusively “Western,” but common to people everywhere.
Like half the poets in America, I imagine, when I heard William Stafford had died, I wanted to write a poem. “When a Poet Dies” is my attempt to use Stafford’s own easy conversational style to tell the story of how his death affected me. When I actually began putting words on paper, I was spending New Year’s Eve writing at a hot spring in Wyoming, and enough time had elapsed—“emotion recollected in tranquility”—to allow me to see more than how much I would miss knowing he was in the world. The deer I observed entered the poem, as did some of his advice to other writers—but it’s all narrated in a story designed to draw in the listener who might not have any idea who Stafford was.
SDR: Also, along these same lines, do you view yourself as a “story-teller,” and if so, do you situate yourself within a specific historical or cultural tradition of story-telling?
LH: I believe that what I do best is tell real
stories (I failed miserably at fiction). My years spent listening to my father
talk about our community, my University training in journalism, my attempts to
write fiction: all of those experiences taught me that people can be drawn into
stories. Before humans learned to
write, bards brought the news in stories set to music. The Great Plains tribes
taught their history, culture, religion by the use of stories. Marketing
geniuses who sell people things they don’t even want know that advertisements
are simply short stories. So I choose to convey my ideas as stories, which I
guess makes me a “story-teller”—a term that, like
“creative-nonfiction,” I’ve only heard in the last few years, and don’t
find very illuminating. I think anything that encourages humans to tell stories
as a way of recalling and enhancing what’s important in our species is good,
but I don’t feel the need to ally myself with story-tellers as a group.
Observation suggests, however, that it’s a new profession.
SDR: Who is
your ideal audience or readership, and why?
LH: I’m tempted to say, with Gertrude Stein, “I
write for myself, and others. The others, dear reader, are an afterthought.” I
had very little audience until I was more than forty years old, since I was
spending most of my time publishing others. At that point I decided it was time
to get serious about this writing business, and still found it hard to be
published. After the twenty-sixth rejection of Windbreak, my first nonfiction book, a diary of a year on the ranch,
I really thought that this time I’d quit writing and do as my mother still
encourages me to do: “get a real job.” And then I saw the documentary
“Heartland,” made about the life of Elinore Pruitt Stewart by Annick Smith
and the Montana Arts Council. I
came out of that movie convinced that it didn’t matter if no one ever read
what I wrote, that I had to keep writing it anyway.
I
think the first requirement of serious writing may be that one should write
primarily for oneself. Thinking about an audience—worrying that “the whole
world is going to read this and what will they think?” can stifle the writer.
Time enough to worry about an audience when its members write letters and demand
your attention.
But,
ideally, I picture two kinds of people reading either my poetry or prose:
intelligent, well-read folks who really want to move to the country, and
intelligent, well-read ranchers who really don’t want anyone else moving into
the country.
SDR: Does this sense of audience or readership then become a factor, or point of consideration, during your actual writing process?
LH: As I indicated above, I think it’s dangerous to
think very much about the audience while writing. If one worries about offending
someone—and in these days of political correctness that is SO easy—you may
end up not writing what you must write. Still, I do all I can to get feedback
from my audience—asking teachers, for example, to send me copies of the
comments their students write. These comments help me learn what I am doing
wrong and correct it: did I fail to explain why this issue is important? Did I
under- or over-estimate the audience’s understanding of the issue? And some of
the comments keep me chuckling all the long miles home.
There is so much being written about the issues I’m interested in, by so many people —skilled and unskilled, well- and ill-informed—that sometimes, in both poetry and prose, I lean toward TRYING to offend or at least startle people in order to get their attention. “Keeping an Eye Out” might be an example.
SDR: Conservation and land-use issues, as well as the rights of women, are two ideologies which clearly inform both your life and your writing. Could you discuss the ways in which these concerns manifest themselves in your poetry, as well as how you manage to balance or resolve the sometimes disparate needs of politics and art?
LH: Once, I would have said I don’t write political
poetry, but I now believe that poetry created in a particular landscape by a
particular consciousness is inherently political, even though the terms we
associate with politics have no business in poetry because they are usually
dead, non-metaphorical. The poetic stories I tell all come from my own responses
to situations which can constitute the ground from which political action
springs.
So “Bitter Creek Junction” is political because it portrays a desperate woman’s dilemma and one way she might solve it. “Haystack: May Afternoon” appears to be a poem about a nap but is political because it censures hunters who don’t take responsibility for their bullets. “The Cost of a Badger Hat” deplores the senseless killing of animals. “Where the Stories Come From” analyzes the role of the poet, the keeper of a culture’s stories—certainly a political business; “Jigsaw Dance” centers on the politics of a couple’s relationship. “How Women Laugh in the Company of Men” is darkly satirical—an activist poem about the rights and responsibilities of women.
“Six Artists at a Country Retreat” is political in a different way; I began by trying to write about the companionship that can grow between a group of women in an isolated situation, and was well into the poem before I realized that the other five women were lesbians. Then it became intriguing to me to conceal my own role and sexual orientation in the poem, to describe each of us by where we came from and the arts we practiced, without making clear what our sexual orientation was: since, obviously, sexual orientation has nothing to do with the quality of one’s art. In a way, then, I became a “straight” woman speaking comfortably about lesbians, which in some of the areas where I regularly speak and read is a daring act.
SDR: Furthermore, do you believe that the poet, or the writer in general, has certain ethical and/or ideological obligations to fulfill? And if so, what exactly are these obligations?
LH: Yes, I believe the poet has the obligation to
speak in her poetry about her ethical beliefs, to use whatever skills she has in
writing or communication to defend her ideas. The poem “Six Artists” is an
example of that: as a woman whose sexual orientation is heterosexual, and who
believes love between people is important regardless of gender, I have a duty to
speak in defense of people who choose otherwise. Each of the poems mentioned in
my answer to the previous question was similarly crafted to make my opinion on
such an issue clear.
I
have recently discovered Muriel Rukeyser’s The
Life of Poetry, first published in 1949, and was delighted to discover her
succinct explanation of the duty of poets:
During
the war, we felt the silence in the policy of the governments of
English-speaking countries. That policy was to win the war first, and work out
the meanings afterward. The result was, of course, that the meanings were lost.
You cannot put these things off. . . . There has been much silence. The silence
of fear [pp. 20-21].
Further, she says:
To
be against war is not enough, it is hardly a beginning. . . . . We are against
war and the sources of war. We are for poetry and the sources of poetry. They
are everyday, these sources, as the sources of peace are everyday, infinite and
commonplace as a look, as each new sun. As we live our truths, we will
communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that
is not lack of war, but fierce and positive” [pp. 213-214].
Each of us, of course, must choose what aspect of life becomes the “aspect of war” we will not tolerate. I read and care about many issues that, so far, I have not written about: the destruction of the rain forest, stripping Alaskan wilderness for a few days’ supply of oil. My choice is to work with issues close to home, where I know the people who will be with me or against me in the battle, where I have long and detailed knowledge of the terrain, where I have “weapons” cached—look how easily I slip into war metaphors! Shades of the activism I have foresworn in order to write!
SDR: Do you feel that women and significant women characters have largely been omitted, to a certain degree, in the majority of literary representations of the American West?
LH: When I first began publishing, I submitted work
with my initials only, believing that a prejudice existed against women in the
publishing world. I’m not sure that was true.
Now I believe the publishing world, like a packrat, has a limited attention span and operates largely by following whatever shiny bauble catches its attention at the moment. In my lifetime, it has noticed with apparent astonishment that several minority elements of our society had something to say: Blacks! Women! Indians! Western women! Each of these “discoveries” is hailed as if the publishers created the phenomenon, instead of having ignored evidence of its existence for years.
In
recent years, thanks in part to lively controversies involving the environment,
publishers have “discovered” the West, so writers from this region may now
have a slight temporary advantage over others in being published.
Certainly
women writers have often been ignored in the whole history of English and
American literature; look at the Norton
Anthology of Literature by Women, which might as well have been called The
Norton Anthology of Women Left out of All Previous Norton Anthologies. Read
what Tillie Olsen has to say in Silences,
(NY: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1965) about women who wrote secretly, the
percentage of women who did not win awards, were not recognized. I cut my
feminist teeth on Olsen’s work, and have distributed the information widely.
SDR: And do you
think this omission has begun to change over the course of the past few decades?
LH: Yes—the fact that I have been widely published
is one example. My barometer of this is very personal: when I began traveling to
give readings and workshops, I created hand-out lists of writing about the Great
Plains to encourage teachers to use regional writers. Those lists were pretty
manageable for awhile: in 10 typewritten pages I could list most of the good
novelists, nonfiction writers, and poets whose books were available. Gradually,
I narrowed my focus and began handing out lists of poets and nonfiction writers,
then narrowed it again to “nature” writers. Now I’ve given up: there are
so many new writers I can’t keep track of them all. And many of them are
women. How wonderful.
I
wonder if part of the reason women have been largely ignored by literary
commentators on the West is because they have tended to write about reality,
whereas many popular male writers tended to enhance the myth of the West. As
examples, I might cite Mary Sandoz’ Old
Jules, Willa Cather, Gretel Ehrlich, Mary Austin. And in modern times,
Patricia Limerick has done a great deal to set these ideas straight. Meanwhile,
the men have consistently written about lone gunmen, violence, and heroes who
are dead to the reader the minute they marry or settle down—clear support for
the old Western myths.
SDR: Also, are there specific ways in which you, as a poet, have deliberately worked to send out a representative voice into this void?
LH: I’d always encouraged women’s writing when I
read my own work or presented workshops, but I now focus more of my poetic
attention —more of my own writing—on issues concerning women. About 1990, I
started looking for women who wrote about land use issues in the West, and
eventually joined with my co-editors Nancy Curtis and Gaydell Collier to produce
Leaning into the Wind: Women Write From
the Heart of the West. To create that book, we sent invitations to six
western states, to small-town newspapers, to agricultural weeklies, to extension
agencies, libraries, arts councils, and teachers, asking women to write about
their lives in the rural West. We deliberately avoided sending invitations to
publications intended only for writers, so many of the women who contributed to
that book had never written before. I consider the work on that
anthology—helping those women find their voices—to be among the most
important accomplishments of my life.
In
May of 2001, Houghton Mifflin published our second anthology created in the same
way, Woven on the Wind: Women Write About
Friendship in the Sagebrush West, in which rural women speak of their
relationships—enmity as well as friendship—with other Western rural women.
Definitely a trend here. (And note that “wind” figures in both titles, so
perhaps wind is also a part of the Western myth—the list of recognizably
“Western” things that Easterners think of first when they think of us.)
In
1996, I began conducting writing workshops for women at my ranch home. Women are
welcome from anywhere, of course. No
matter where they are from, many say that reading my work has made them realize
they want to write about their own lives, and about similar issues.
SDR: You’ve spoken about the kinship you feel to both early women homesteader diarists as well as to contemporary prairie women writers. Could you perhaps discuss the importance of writings by these women and the types of literary contributions these voices have to offer?
LH: I’ve found them an inspiration, when I find my
work too difficult, or my life too hard, and I recommend them to other women for
that reason. Modern folk tend to think we need therapy, or medical attention, or
at least sympathy for many conditions these women took as part of daily life. I
think the diarists’ most significant contribution may be reminding us that
women have never been less capable than men, so that we may ignore or disprove
that idea whenever it comes around again.
SDR: Along similar lines, can you address the import and significance of the concept of “community” among women writers– particularly among Western women writers—such as the literary community offered at your own Windbreak House?
LH: Perhaps men encourage each other as women do, and
certainly some women are as capable of backbiting jealousy as men. But in
general, I have found a generosity among women writers—pitching in to plug
each other’s books, providing examples of how they’ve had trouble with their
writing, generally offering support and encouragement with no thought of
competition.
At Windbreak House, we so often find that whatever problem one of us is writing about, the others have worked through it, either in writing or living. There’s an openness that encourages us to talk about even difficult topics, and an acknowledgment that by communicating about these things, we may help younger women avoid some of the same difficulties we have had.
SDR: What are some of the most fulfilling experiences you’ve had as a teacher/mentor/fellow writer in the trenches at Windbreak House?
LH: I’ve learned that many women have had similar
experiences to mine: being told by a university professor that I wasn’t smart
enough for graduate school and should go back to South Dakota and have babies.
That didn’t stop me from writing—though it was a factor in my deciding to
abandon my Ph.D. studies– but I have seen women who did stop writing because
of such statements. So it is rewarding to find them at Windbreak House, and see
that they are encouraged by my example, and by my comments on their writing.
It is rewarding to watch them finding their voices, beginning to speak
the wisdom they have acquired in 20 or 30 or 40 years of living—and without
asking some authority figure if their work is acceptable by some spurious
standard. Several of the women have written work at Windbreak House that has
subsequently been published; in some cases it was their first publication, and
while publication is not the most important standard by which I measure their
success, it was satisfying to them, and that gives me great joy.
Pieces
by three women who worked on those essays at Windbreak House also appear in Woven on the Wind. Clearly the decision to publish these was made by
my co-editors, because I was too close to the women and their work to feel
securely objective.
SDR: Do you feel your poetry has changed, grown, or developed over the years from the time you first started publishing your poems?
LH: I hope it’s matured! But I don’t feel that I
have devoted enough time to the study and reading of poetry, nor have I worked
hard enough and with enough sustained attention on it, to bring it to the
standard I would demand of myself if poetry was my primary interest in writing.
I don’t read nearly as much poetry as I read essays on the environment, nor
study it with nearly the same attentiveness. I learn from the poets I read and
hear, and I experiment with new ideas. Certainly my approach to poetry and the
content of my poems has changed, and I try always to demand a high standard of
the work that reaches print. But I feel humble in the presence of people who
work at poetry all the time, and don’t expect ever to achieve the quality of
writing of the masters in the field.
SDR: What kinds of changes do you feel have informed
your poetic process, and have these changes been deliberate or unconscious on
your part?
LH: I’ve been experimenting in the last few years
with longer narrative poems, but this is in part a response to audiences who
attend the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. I can’t help
trying to write what those folks seem to enjoy—though I don’t go so far in
pandering to their tastes as to write rhymed iambic pentameter.
The biggest change has been my growing confidence that, for me, I will write poetry for recreation and enjoyment. I’m still accused of writing too much about death— which is probably true since I write about things I don’t understand. But lately I’ve tried to write more narrative character studies; they are serious attempts to portray real Western people—so these are more closely connected to my prose writing. But I also feel more comfortable including humor, which is, of course, a Western—or a human—survival technique, and thus also a serious element. The poem “Keeping an Eye Out” is an example of this kind of poem, and of course might get me drummed right out of the average academic gathering. Still, when people are laughing at it, they may also realize that the poem’s character offered me important advice which I am able, through the poem, to pass along to the audience.
SDR: Finally, if you were given the opportunity to
write a poem that would have the public exposure of, say, a presidential
inauguration poem, what kind of a poem would you choose to write, and why?
LH: OK, I’ll fantasize. Fantasy is fun! I would try
to combine two elements: a positive view of the country—which might have to be
drawn from history, and probably from the history of the west—with a call to
the kind of unified action that we’re going to have to take to get ourselves
our of our current economic, political, and environmental mess. I think I’d
search for a central character from Western history to be the speaker in the
poem, and use a narrative structure.
Ah! I’d choose a woman of color who found freedom and a good life in the West. She’d speak the poem to her descendants, and the current rulers in Washington, about what we will lose if we forget that hard work is important; she’d speak of the moral code of humanity and its importance, and perhaps she’d warn us that if we follow policies the current administration appears to advocate, we will destroy our own homeland.
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