Susan Rich, Seattle Poet with E.C. Murray

Interview with Susan Rich

Susan Rich explored the world before settling down to poetry. With a degree in International affairs from Harvard, Susan worked with Amnesty International, the Peace Corps, and as a human rights trainer in Gaza and the West Bank. She has written three poetry books, including her recent, The Alchemists Kitchen. With poems published in magazines from the Christian Science Monitor to the Alaska Quarterly, she has been awarded the Times Literary Supplement Award, a residency at Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, an Artist Trust Fellowship, and a Seattle City Artist Project Award, as well as participation in the Cuirt Literary Festival in Galway, Ireland. For a more complete view of Susan's accomplishments, www.susanrich.net. First published April, 2011

Like so many writers, your passion for writing was once almost crushed. After a decade of world travel and human rights work, you returned to writing. What advice would you give to a person who once loved to write, but put it aside because they were discouraged?

When I was a college student several of my male professors told me in subtle and not so subtle ways: you don't have what it takes to be a writer. I was young, fairly innocent, and believed too much in their authority as "professors." It took ten years of living in order for me to return to what I loved - creating music out of my imagination, creating a word order, structure, a line break that no one had quite done this way before!

So to answer your question simply - and yet the answer is far from simple - as a writer, don't ever give your power away. Don't let anyone else be the final judge of your work. This is tricky because a young writer, any writer, must open themselves to learning new literary tools - new ways of putting the words on paper.

What saved me as a poet and allowed me to return to the open field of the blank page was to check my ego at the door. I returned to writing poetry, for me and not for anyone else. I gave up my romanticized idea of the poet and wrote because it's (you've heard this before) what I needed to do. Mark Doty says in an interview with Bill Moyers that until he writes about an experience it seems incomplete - that the poem becomes a kind of varnish allowing his life (any life) to shine.

In the end, I have no recourse but to write to please myself.
  

Do you have suggestions of where a "want to be" writer or poet might begin? For example, you've said you don't get up two hours before breakfast every day.

Of course everyone is different; for me, I required the structure of a writing class - even if it was conducted around a dining room table. I wanted to learn. What led me back to a life of writing was a Tuesday evening poetry class conducted out of my teacher's home.

The teacher, because she herself felt snubbed by the Boston literary life, was emphatic that no one social class or gender owned the life of poetry. Three years flew by as I took weekly classes from various poets in the Boston / Cambridge area. Slowly, I started sending my poems into the world and, to my utter surprise, different journals began to accept them.

But here's the key: before I could send my work out, I needed to really accept that my poetry was my own and not up for final evaluation by others.

"Writing well is the best revenge," Zelda Fitzgerald explained in her novel. As the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, we can only assume how difficult it was for her to be viewed as a serious writer. I came across that quote when I was a teenager and it has served me well.

 
Millions of people have written poetry and wondered, "Is this any good?" How is a poem judged?

Paul Valery wrote, "a poem is never finished, only abandoned." How is a piece of music judged? Or a painting or a film? I want my poem to surprise me - to do something utterly new and elegant in the sense that an equation is slimmed down to only its essential parts. Beyond that, I look for poems that startle me out of the everyday - that are at once playful, profound and dangerous. But this is my own idiosyncratic desire. Different editors have different tastes. Every Indian restaurant includes a curry dish on the menu - but some use more spice, others more butter or cream. Taste is individual.

You've said that you know a poem is finished when you can read it aloud without wincing or circling words to change. How many rewrites does a poem usually take to get to this point?

For me, the number of revisions varies widely. At times, I've written upwards of fifty versions of a poem and I don't think I've ever "finished" a poem with less than seven or eight revisions - well maybe once. I'd say fifteen to twenty versions is an average number of rewrites for me. I know when I'm trying something brand new - developing an original scaffolding for my poems - it takes me more drafts to feel satisfied. For example, when I wrote "Mohamud at the Mosque" I wrote over forty versions. I was afraid I would never get it right.

What do you say to encourage the writer who feels too afraid to read their work out loud at, say, an Open Mic?

Honestly, I think it is healthy to be afraid of the Open Mic! Writing poems and reading poems to an audience are two completely different sides of the brain. Oftentimes, they do not go together. I wrote (and published) for several years before I ever read my work to an audience - and it wasn't through an Open Mic. Too many times, I've seen the Open Mic poet be interested only in his own words and ignore the other readers or worse - be scornful. What new poet needs that?

However, I do believe it is important to deliver one's work to an audience but there are so many ways to do this. For example, the Jack Straw Writers Program selects twelve writers each year and provides workshops on performance, the use of the microphone, and practice interviews. In addition, the program sets up readings for the Jack Straw Fellows at places such as Elliot Bay Books, Burning Word, and the Folklife Festival. Writers accepted into the program range from utterly unpublished writers to those with book publications. Washington State's Floating Bridge Press is another superb resource in our state for new writers. Each year Floating Bridge Press publishes the Floating Bridge Review and organizes a series of readings for the journal's published poets throughout the state. In other words, many paths exist for a new writer to gain experience giving readings.

When I read that you liked to play the license plate game,  with the aim of publishing in poetry journals in every state, I laughed. How do you laugh or stay joyful when writing intimately about issues of suffering and injustice?

Oftentimes I find myself writing a poem with a human rights theme followed by a poem about "Food for Fallen Angels" or "Sugar, You Know Who You Are" as a sort of ying and yang. I write as many love poems these days as I do poems concerning international human rights. How else can one keep writing or living except with the ability to laugh? When I worked for Amnesty International USA we would often laugh at the most inappropriate jokes as a sort of coping mechanism for our work.

 
You "found your muse," so to speak, after working in international human rights.  What do you recommend for the poet who stays home?

Everyone needs to do something different. For me, I needed to get out of my skin and into another world. Travel and living in many different countries in Europe and Africa allowed me life experiences I never could have had at home. But for another writer, she might need to learn about geology or spend years as a pastry chef. I do believe, however, that a poet needs to live in the world, to know one aspect of human experience really well. For some that might mean starting a band or developing a passion for garden sheds.

Would you share a few tips for aspiring writers and poets?

I believe in dead poetry mentors. The library and bookstores are filled with the work of dead poets. I've taken Elizabeth Bishop as one my mentors and luckily, since she's dead, she's agreed to take me on as her student. I've read her poems, letters, essays, and biographies. I've read novels about her lovers and her time in Brazil. I even know what it says on her tombstone: "Awful, but cheerful." The point is, I can immerse myself in her life and work. Through this process of study, I hope that I learn from her concerning language, line breaks, subject matter, etc.

Try this: find a poet whose work you like and immerse yourself in their artistic and biographical life. As poets, we are all related - it makes perfect sense to check out some of the ancestors and learn what you can.

And one last thing: don't be afraid to fail. Try writing in different styles and working in different kinds of subject matter. Poetry is the study of wonder, it's the study of human experience, and we'll need more than one lifetime to get it right.

Thank you, Susan. I look forward to seeing you at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.