Interviewed
In an interview conducted in 2002, Kathleen Halme discusses Every Substance Clothed and Equipoise, as well as history and anthropology.
Pallos, Josephine. "A Green Thought in a Green Shade: Interview with Kathleen Halme." South Carolina Review 36.1 (2003): 122-25. Print.
Note: The interviewer’s last name, Pallos, changed to Yu when she married.Yu: Many of the poems of Every Substance Clothed address the unavoidable discrepancies between recorded histories and the way events actually occurred.
Halme: For me, and many writers, the poem or short story or novel takes place exactly in those disruptions and interstices. This nice tension pushes invention. All history is, of course, revisionary.
Yu: In "Every Substance is Clothed" you ask, "Must I keep allegiance to the reality stone?" Dickey argued that a poet must make use of the creative possibilities of the lie. Often you act as a poet, which requires this creativity, and as a historian, which requires accuracy.
Halme: I agree with Dickey's notion of creative lying in poetry, and Stevens' idea of poetry as the "supreme fiction" has always been useful to me. I started out writing fiction and had trouble making things up; I began writing poetry and made things up as needed. Some readers may feel jerked around by this. Why should poetry be limited to one's own experiences? That's dull, and insulting to the range of human imagination, but we seem to have many odd expectations about poetry we would never apply to any other art form. When I write poems that need historically accurate details, for example, is a certain constellation in the sky over Cross Plains, Wisconsin in October, then I will research that kind of fact-based information. Emotional facts are another matter; they morph.
Yu: One of the subtitles of "Polyptych: Couches of the Dead" is the statement "Culture Is a Prophylatic." What is culture used to defend against or protect?
Halme: It was an anthropologist at an NEH summer seminar I participated in ten years ago on "The Poetics of Everyday Life" who said, "culture is a prophylactic." I've enjoyed that phrase for years and wish I could remember the name of the speaker or context of that utterance. The anthropologists at this eight-week seminar were famous for saying all kinds of outrageous things with authority. They encouraged me to do ethnographic fieldwork but to write my findings as poetry; in the late twentieth century "crisis of representation" they said this genre could be the next form of subjectivity in ethnography. We spent a summer talking about how terms like "art," "poetics," and "aesthetics" are part of the habits of daily life in every culture. Never before have I felt more like "a kangaroo among the beauty." The participants were doing work on sheep stealing rituals in Crete, headhunting chants in Sulawesi, competing "ideas and ideologues" in the Egyptian market place, things like that. I took a lot of notes. I'm seeing "culture as a prophylactic" as a form for poetry. It's a membrane, often impermeable, but sometimes semi-permeable. Sometimes a clear word slips through. The membrane can sometimes let sad moments slip through as well: in "Polyptych: Couches of the Dead," the girl's growing vulnerability is forced upon her by oblivious adults who are sticking to form/ritual, the Saturday night Sauna in Finnish-American immigrant culture, which is terrifying to the child because only she is conscious of the liminal sexualized scenario in this living room. Being outside of a language, being forced to take part in the form of ritual (couples sauna together, single people of one sex sauna together), the girl's own evolving sexuality aggravated by her aunt's insensitivity and living room sexplay with her new husband, and the carving on the wall depicting what the girl sees as hideous women's bodies beating themselves with birch switches in the sauna—the simultaneity of these events accrete to keep the girl on the outside of this world, and vulnerable. Also, the "I am not ethnic" aunt represents the new American who wants to lose the past, the Old World, as thoroughly as possible. It's up to the "actual girl," the first generation (an old story) to make sense of that space where cultures overlap. That weird disjunction of not being completely of one place has been a good source of tension in my poetry. Whenever I go to Finland I am overwhelmed by sadness, immense but not sentimental, especially as the look of realization—the elderly woman in the grocery asking me if I know where the soap is—passes across a Finnish face when I open my mouth and try to speak the language. I was not born there.
Yu: What lead you to study anthropology?
Halme: I studied quite a bit of anthropology because I hated how literature was taught when I was a student. Anthropology was inclusive and it gave lenses no literature class seemed to provide, at least not when and where I took courses. And I love the new work in neurotheology, reassuring theory for poets. One of the books I recently read is Why God Won't Go Away by Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili and Vince Rause. The work shows how we are "wired" for mysticism, how our urge to merge is biological. The three and a half pounds of the average human brain, the twelve billion neurons packed to fire want to physically experience immersion. How that union is restored through ritual, especially through language, intrigues me. Ritual provides a way for humans to restore the felt-union between themselves and assumed-to-be spiritual sources. Our brains are built for this, no matter what kind of belief system we have shaped.
Yu: In "Sauna" the narrator, considering her family, states, "Love and luxury have no claim here. / Only words that work." Is poetry pure luxury?
Halme: Poets are the ultimate pragmatists. I've had to tell myself this for years or I wouldn't be able to write. As far as I know, I am the first person in my gene pool to do art as a life. Woodcutters, farmers, nurses, meat cutters, miners. This poem speaks to these people, my people. "Sauna" was one of my first poems, and of course it's a common subject for a young poet: a speaker trying to come to terms with a self in conflict with his or her family's culture. The speaker is desperate to find her own words to empower herself. The people around her have few outlets for pleasure. Even when a small luxury is served up—the seven kinds of sweets—it has to be earned through the sting and suffocation of the cleansing ritual. She is outside of their vowel-laden language and their expedient value system. As a girl she sees marriage as the only form of escape. Awash in the unanswered questions of this family's history, the omnipresent unspoken, it's a natural next step for her to begin inventing answers and to find ways to protect herself. In this poem's moment the only luxury is her mind thinking its thoughts. I recently looked at one of my first writing notebooks in which I had scribbled: I write because I don't exist. The speaker in "Sauna" feels the same urgency to create an order, to accrete a workable life. That's no luxury, it's pure necessity. We desperately need this more than ever. Useful beauty: that's what I want poetry to be.
Yu: Though so many of your poems examine ancestry and family ties, only one poem, "Autotomy," addresses motherhood. How did the tone in "Autotomy" develop?
Halme: It amazes me that reproduction is still a universal social expectation for women. I've got an agile connection to generative space through my writing. To me, language is a trusty mother. My favorite book on this subject has been Mardy S. Ireland's Reconceiving Women: Separating Motherhood from Female Identity. I'm mentioning this here because the decision about motherhood is a huge issue for poets. Sometimes one is lucky enough to make choices: the cornerstone of my adult identity is my writing.
Yu: A reoccurring theme in your first book is the alteration of old rituals. The narrator in "The Second Sunday of Easter" asks, as she kneels in church, "Why am I, invader of old rituals, here?" Is the poet, attempting to create a new work from an ancient tradition, also an invader of rituals?
Halme: Yes, this fits right in with recent neurotheological theory. Evolution has supposedly wired our brains with an incredible urge to merge, to find pleasure in escaping the restrictions of a self. The authors of Why God Won't Go Away talk about how we constantly remake ritual to try to attain union with what we perceive as spiritual sources. I remake rituals to make them useful as poetic forms. Sure, most poets I know are "invaders of old rituals." I've seen this transformation in many of my contemporaries' books; it's handled with grace in Suzanne Paola's recent poetry collection, Bardo, in C.D. Wright's wondrous Deep Step Come Shining and Louise Glück's The Wild Iris. There are many, many others. In light of the ongoing morphing of social roles in our culture, especially for women, the transformation of myth and ritual is inevitable.
Yu: The titles of several poems in Equipoise are appropriated from the poetry of Andrew Marvell. Could you discuss his influence on your work?
Halme: Volumes of the complete poems of Marvell, Dickinson and Stevens are on my writing desk. Marvell's preoccupation with the processes of mind and how he enacts them in an overblown eroticism appeals to me; Stevens does this too but in a less bodily way. I like poems that flaunt how the mind can give pleasure through language. The sixth section of Marvell's "The Garden" is one of my favorite pieces of poetry: Meanwhile the mind from pleasures less, Withdraws into its happiness: The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find, Yet it creates, transcending these Far other worlds and other seas, Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade. I've sometimes used bits of his poems as titles for my own, but I've also done this with lines from Wordsworth and Dickinson. It's a way to start a poem on a sunny day. I had a list of over fifty titles, some borrowed lines, most written by me, for my second book before I started writing it. It's almost like studying town names on maps of places you've never been. For me, Dickinson remains the wildest poet. What's not to love about her wit and excision and glamour, her rich intelligences and humor? One of the three best things that ever happened to me was studying with Alice Fulton in her first year of teaching at the University of Michigan. She is Dickinson's poetic offspring. This is most evident in her last collection, Felt. Alice's influence is everywhere in my work, my poems and my teaching. As her students we were taught to take no word/no form/no stance for granted. I got to study poetry with a kind genius; one doesn't outgrow that.
Yu: Water is an important element in both books. Every Substance Clothed steams with saunas, while Equipoise frequently bobs on ocean saltwater.
Halme: What new can be said about the pull to ocean? We're bags of saline in a lunar cycle; we can't help but feel that force; 71 percent of the earth's surface is ocean. I lived for seven years on the North Carolina coast, a real hurricane magnet. Now I live about seventy miles from the Pacific. My husband and I spend as much time as possible at the coast. I love the mutability of the intertidal zone near Wilmington where the Cape Fear fans out into the Atlantic and the way the Oregon coast, at least up here in the northern part of the state, looks as though it were ripped this morning from the coast range. I'm floored by the new discoveries in deep sea exploration. I don't mean the discovery of the Titanic. Thermal vents, tube worms, eelpouts, vampire squids! Astonishing discoveries of new species are being made almost every time the submersibles go down. Perhaps the ocean has such pull because most of it is still out of our range of vision; its average depth is two miles and goes as far as seven miles. Also, when I read Adrienne Rich's "Diving Into the Wreck" as a young woman, I saw the ocean as a relatively safe place for a female. Of course this is not true, but the open ocean seemed less inscribed than the shore. The ocean, too, is a mirror that doesn't work, but that won't stop us from trying.
Yu: How do you feel teaching affects your work?
Halme: Stevedore, notary public, gift wrapper are lines of work that appeal to me right now. I don't mean to sound ungrateful: I love teaching, it was tremendous fun for the first fifteen years. I taught several deeply gifted writers; I taught hundreds of students who probably won't write after college. I don't think that matters much. Most of what a creative writing professor's job is, at the beginning level at least, is to teach sensitivity to language. This is useful for any kind of life, I think. Perhaps I gave too much to my teaching; I don't want to respond to any more work in progress except for that of a few friends. I think this is true for many teachers of creative writing. I liked A.R. Ammons' honest assessment a few years back about the same three problems coming up again and again in student writing—problems with diction, shape, and consistency—because it articulated so well the frustrations of being a teacher/writer. This year I am on leave and writing six hours a day.
Yu: What projects are you currently working on?
Halme: I'm at work on new poems that surprise me. Somehow it took four years—quite frustrating—to reshape my sensibility when I moved from coastal North Carolina to Portland, Oregon. The change seems to have had something to do with being crowded by natural beauty here in the Northwest, spending a summer reading everything Heather McHugh has written and rereading Dickinson and Fulton, looking into neurotheology and ecocritism. Many of my new poems take place in the poetic ecotone. An ecotone is a transition zone between two adjacent ecological communities, such as a forest and grassland. It has some characteristics of each border community but also species not found in the overlapping communities. It's a blending, a blurred border, an overlap. Remember the Venn diagrams from junior high geometry, the middle of sets shaded where they overlap? The poetic ecotone is the overlap zone of language, culture, emotion, image, any overloaded metaphoric space. It's a space for form's form.
