Interview with Poet Rebecca Foust - Kirsten | Learn English at EnglishCafe

Here is another poet interview.  This  is an interview with a Northern California poet named Rebecca Foust .  Her book, Dark Card, a book of poetry about raising a son with Asperger's (a type of autism) has gained national attention.  She has recently published a second book called Mom's Canoe.  (http://www.rebeccafoust.com/)

The question I am always interested in:  what draws an individual to creative expression?

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Rebecca Foust    

Interviewed by Kirsten Jones Neff  

When Marin poet Rebecca Foust read at the launch party that Book Passage threw in August for publication of Dark Card, her debut chapbook, 170 people turned out for the event. This, for a poet who has written seriously only since 2006.   

Dark Card is a cycle of poems about raising a son with Asperger’s Syndrome.   Asperger’s (previously known as “Savant Syndrome”) is a disorder on the autism spectrum which Wikipedia defines as “characterized by difficulties in social interaction and restricted, stereotyped patterns of behavior and interests.”  Dark Card thus is inevitably also a book about parenthood, about the pain of loving a child for who he is and wanting to protect that child.   

MPC: Sharon Olds says that she writes poems, not books, that she has a very difficult time putting books together.  Is that true for you?   

BF: Well, I have two books now.  The second book won the same award that my first book won (The Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize).  The second one is called Mom’s Canoe and it is poems about growing up in Western Pennsylvania.  Both Dark Card and Mom’s Canoe were really no effort at all…  The poems about autism are all from a journal I kept in my closet.  I wrote on a stool I kept in my closet - I called it my crying stool...  I write a lot of poems, so one day I sat down and laid out all the poems about this subject.  Then I played around with the order.  I started with about forty poems and whittled them down to about 26 poems per book.  

MPC: When you say you write a lot of poems, what do you mean?  A poem a day?   

BF: No… I might go two or three weeks without writing a poem, then I sit down … and write six or seven.  I had one little burst of creativity about ten years ago when I wrote about thirty poems.  Then I didn’t write at all until the year I turned fifty.

  At that time my son was in middle school and I took a poetry workshop…  I was so unprofessional that once, when the instructor said I should send my poems out,  I didn’t even know what he meant, and I never did [send any out].  Then we moved to California and I threw myself into advocacy organizations, to promote awareness around autism.  Then, about a year and half ago I took a memoir class at Book Passage… I was writing memoirs that were … not getting any reaction and one day I brought in a poem and it got such a [strong] reaction and I thought, “Maybe this is what I should be doing.”  

Then it was like turning on a spigot, like the poems were already written and I just had to sit down and write them out.  It was like that for the first year and a half…  if I sat down and wrote, it would come out.   Then I started to slow down a little bit.  I’m getting my MFA at Warren Wilson now and it’s making me more self-conscious.  It was better when I didn’t know what I didn’t know… Before, I was very free and wrote without what Annie Lamott calls “that critic in the background.”  I never used to have that and I have that now.   

MPC: How do you submit your poetry for publication?

BF: I use an old-fashioned card catalogue and a submission record.  With my system, once you’re set up, you don’t think about it.  The good thing about that is it takes a lot of the emotional weight out of it, so that you don’t care as much when you get rejections.  I get tons of rejections.  Once I got nine rejections in one day.  I’ve actually come to the point where I never view a rejection as a condemnation of my work, or an acceptance as validation.  I’ve had some poems rejected a dozen or more times, then accepted by a very good place.   

MPC: Your story of early success validates that what we’re looking for most in poetry is something authentic and heartfelt.   

BF: Yes.  In the beginning it felt like such a meritocracy because I literally knew nobody and had zero connections.  So I reveled in that:  if I got anywhere it was because of the strength of my poems.  And I was very lucky.  I am forever going to workshops where none of the people have published anything and they are better writers than me…  I am persistent and I do not get discouraged.   

MPC: Is there something specific in your background that led you to poetry?   

BF: I’ve always loved writing and always wrote in a journal to deal with pain.  People say “fair-weather writer” --  I’m a foul-weather writer.  But I’ve always loved poetry.  As an undergrad at Smith I took a lot of poetry classes.  I read the same poetry over and over for years.  Yeats -- I was mesmerized by Yeats.  I really loved Shakespeare, and Chaucer too.   I just like the way they sound.   

MPC: Do contemporary poets inspire you?

BF: Sharon Olds was the first contemporary poet that I really felt a resonance with.  Mary Oliver.  Kay Ryan, long before she was Kay Ryan… And Louise Gluck.   

MPC: You say you love rhyme?

BF: I do love rhyme, uncool as that may currently be, my ear for it having been honed at an early age by my mother's bedtime reads of old chestnuts like "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "The Highwayman" and "Charge of the Light Brigade."  My current favorite poet is [Theodore] Roethke, whose complex and sophisticated and achingly beautiful rhyme patterns I strive, without much current success (sadly!), to emulate.  He has a way of winding up a rhyme pattern by, for example, making every end word in a single stanza some sort of slant rhyme or variation on the same basic sound, and then releasing it with a return to another, less concentrated pattern established earlier in the poem, that is quite powerful and wonderful.  I gravitate towards form in general and my current favorite book of poetry is The Whole Truth by James Cummins, a kind of super-sestina comprised of 24 sestinas linked to tell a complex but surprisingly cohesive story based on the Perry Mason TV series--a remarkable, funny and heartbreaking book.   

MPC: Reading Dark Card, I noticed that your isolation is there, but lingering in the background behind your son’s isolation.  

BF: Oh yeah.  There’s a lot of rage in that book.  The arc of that book is from grief and fear, through rage to something like acceptance…  Yes, I thought that when I finished that book I’d be done.  And I didn’t want to become known as the “Autism Poet”… what I’ve realized is that autism is … a metaphor for the loneliness that is part of [the human] condition.   

Since an article in the Marin Independent Journal (Aug 28, 2008) I’ve received so many letters, [a lot] from people whose children … have some other kind of disorder.  I think my poems give people… permission to express their rage.   

MPC: How is the Marin poetry scene for you?

BF: What I've enjoyed most… is its vibrancy and enthusiasm -- there are plenty of opportunities for a new poet to get experience with reading her poetry out loud to a live audience.  I especially appreciate places like MPC, which offers rich intellectual opportunities (Thursday night workshops, bookshops, interesting poets and speakers) and community service like poetry in the schools and the High School Poetry contest.  The downside is that there is SO MUCH going on that you can get burned out trying to make it to everything.

MPC: Why do you think poetry is the art form that speaks to you?  

BF:  I really think music is superior.  I would love to be a musician.  But why poetry?  Poetry is so powerful because of the concentration.  It’s the gut-punch.  You can read a novel or memoir and not get that gut-punch.  Poetry leaves me breathless.    

UNDERNEATH  

His face is blank as a kettle pond

dawn, but he feels everything  

there is underneath --  

tadpoles, minnows, sunfish, perch,  

fish-hooks, tangled lines,  

frays of fatyarn algae strands,  

filaments tethering lily stars  

that from above seem free to skim,  

milkt writhe of swimmers' legs,  

mossed undersides of floats,  

surprising truth of sailboat keels,  

their iceberg depth.  

        By Rebecca Foust

NO LONGER MEDUSA

When I had you I gave birth

to my miror,  

the chink in my armor.  

Once I turned men to adamantine  

with a glance, dove from cliffs  

into dark quarries, swung grapevines  

over ravines, rode arcs of tall birch trees  

into the ground. Now I am alive  

all night with fear for you, undone  

by your sweet, milky breath,  

the bobcat tufts on your ears,  

your pink ribbon gums.  

You freeze my heart to stone  

when I measure your foot with my thumb.  

By Rebecca Foust