Interview With Poet Rose Black - Kirsten | Learn English at EnglishCafe

I love hearing from people about their relationship with language.  Here is an interview with a poet from the Bay Area, California named Rose Black.   Rose Black wrote poetry as a child, then became a business woman and did not write any poetry for thirty years.  When she began to write again, she self-published two books of poetry which have received significant critical acclaim.   

( This interview appeared in the Marin Poetry Center newsletter Sept., 2009).

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Rose Black: Voices in the Fabric of the Whole  

by Kirsten Jones Neff

Rose Black’s journey to poetry is a writer’s fairy tale.  After three decades’ working at a career that never quite suited her, she and her husband, the sculptor Robert Black, moved their home and studio to an abandoned factory yard near the train tracks in the East Oakland flatlands. Starting in 1989, they built a business (Renaissance Stone), planted trees, and transformed the land.  Here, Rose Black writes poetry.  A long-time MPC member, she self-published two books, Clearing (2005) and Winter Light (2008), both of which gained widespread acclaim and were recently accepted by Yale’s Beinecke Library for the Yale Collection of American Literature.     

KJN:  Tell me how your work made its way to Yale's Beinecke Library

I gave away a lot my books. They were found on a friend’s coffee table in Los Angeles.  The rare books librarian from Yale noticed them there and liked them. She said the Beinecke Library was looking for books such as these and would I mind if she submitted them for me. I can’t tell you how thrilled I was about that because there’s a stigma attached to self-publishing. It never occurred to me to do anything but self-publish because of the kind of person I am.  Robert and I have done everything ourselves, always.  It never occurred to me not to do it this way.   

KJN:  Do you send poems out for publication?

I didn’t understand much about the business of poetry and how there was a competitive element to it. All of that is very daunting.  Some of the poems in my book had been published, but I do not really send my work out very well and there were many poems that had not been published. So the Beinecke Library's validation of my work meant a lot to me. But again, I couldn’t have done it any other way.  Probably for my next book, I’ll also self-publish.    

KJN: Who are your poetic influences?

I could not have done anything at all without the wonderful teachers I’ve had and the generosity and support of my fellow poets. I could not have done anything. Writing poetry is a lonely business. My major teachers have been Robert Sward, Margaret Kaufman, Terry Ehret, and David St.John.  I've also learned a lot from my friend and Rilke teacher, Daniel Polikoff. And, 'Lyn Follet and Susan  Terris have been invaluable. Susan Terris wakes up very early and she told me I could call her any time. Once I called her with an urgent publishing problem very very early in the morning.  They both help many people.  

KJN: Where do you think the generosity in the poetry community comes from?

I think maybe the process of writing poetry opens you up in a way, and that, for many people, it makes them better people. There are so many different kinds of poetry, and so likes and dislikes become quite subjective. The only poet I can think of who is universally thought of as great is Shakespeare. But David St. John calls our poetry an ongoing conversation.  He makes the point over and over again that all of our voices are important to the fabric of the whole, and that is a beautiful way of looking at it.   

Last night, as I was driving back from a Marin Poetry Center Summer Traveling Show poetry reading at Falkirk, I noticed how joyful I felt, how exhilarated. I smiled all the way home. Good poetry is like that. It wants to be shared and it wants to connect. It is inclusive and true and generous. So perhaps these qualities act on the makers of poems, and they delight in being generous as well.

KJN: What do you look for in a poetry teacher?

The most important thing for me is to feel safe and challenged at the same time.  Both are so important.  It is frightening to expose yourself, it is your very insides you are baring to the world.  All of my teachers have been so smart and at the same time so supportive. You can’t write a good poem unless you are willing to write a bad poem. You have to be willing to experiment and just put it out there.

KJN:  How did you come to embrace prose poetry?

Terry Ehret … introduced me to the prose poem.  This has been so important for my growth as a poet.  I didn’t know one was allowed to write poems like that, and that genre has freed me in many ways. I think … for some people it’s the opposite – they find more freedom with lined poetry. But for me the prose poem allows me to be less self-conscious. I felt like I was stiff in the lined poetry format and with the prose poem there was a loosening-up. Now an interesting thing has happened. Susan Terris suggested I go back to lined poetry because she felt that would enhance my work. So lately I have, and I believe she is right.  

KJN:  Did you always write?

I wrote poetry in high school and loved it a lot, and then I didn’t write poetry for another thirty years.  My whole self went underground for a while.  I was a real estate broker for more than thirty years… and when I tell a lot of people that they say, “I can’t imagine anything that is less you,” and, in so many ways, that is true.  I was just soul-starved.  The parts of me I wanted used weren’t being used.  There were parts of real estate I enjoyed, but the biggest commission in the world never compared with writing something that I needed and wanted to express, with the thrill of writing a good poem.  

KJN:  Was it difficult to write the first poem after not writing for so many years?

It was terrifying.  I was a very good real estate  broker and it was terrifying to be a beginner at something when  I was in my forties.  Terrifying.  And my poems were not very good at all at first.  So I had to be somewhere where I could be held and nurtured like a young child.  But it eventually became about the poem instead of the ego.  That is the thing that is exciting, and if I can associate with people who feel likewise it is exhilarating. It is freedom. Actual freedom.   

KJN:  How does this place you created and now live and work in (Renaissance Stone) inform your work?

I think it has to do with allowing myself to be authentic.  We felt so able to create here, so unconfined.  My father, many years ago, took a dense woodland and turned it into a very beautiful place.  Not too done up, still wild and primitive, but he worked very hard on it with patience and love, and I think that is what we have done here, instead of buying into a more material way of life.  And the poetry just attracted to mess. I really am.  I am allergic to fancy.  I want something that is basic and primal.  I think that is what we have done here, instead of buying into a more material way of life.  And the poetry just fits.  Margaret Kaufman once described my work as  “fecund chaos”, and that is right on.  I am very attracted to mess. I really am.  I am allergic to fancy.  I want something that is basic and primal.  I like the concept of compost. Gary Snyder has a wonderful poem about compost, “from the dark bottom, turn it inside out,” and I adore that.  This neighborhood, which is such a mess in so many ways, the most amazing things happen here.  The life and beauty that spring up unexpectedly are unbelievable.  The process of transformation excites me.  We came to this place.  There wasn’t anything here.  Poets make messes beautiful.  In a way we poets are alchemists and we transform straw into gold.  We acknowledge paradox and shadow.  We transform our experiences.   

KJN:  What is your approach to writing?

I am very slow and that is just the way I am.  It takes me a long time to write a poem I am satisfied with.  I will make a mess, all over the sheet, on the margins.  I write in longhand first and let my mind wander and it's really bad stuff and that’s just the way it has to be.   I’ll take a kernel from that, an image. A compelling image is so important. Image and specificity. Then I can go from there. I know from my teachers that the personal leads to the universal.  Write the personal and your poem will be credible.  It will be real, and your reader will identify with it. So many people are paralyzed because they think they have to write great stuff right away.  Have you heard the wonderful saying “Write drunk, edit sober,”?  You have to just go into it.  It’s like being in an altered state.

KJN:  Has writing poetry changed your life?

I don’t feel so lonely anymore. I don’t feel lonely at all. We all need to find our people.  My people are my fellow poets. It’s like my church.