KIRPAL GORDON: I first discovered your poems in the
indie magazines of the late Seventies and early Eighties. Your lines produce a
sense of the profound and what knocks me out about your style is that, though
it seems inspired by Asian meditation practice, it’s “just so” without the
cultural “scaffolding,” as if you’d grokked a tao-buddha-nondual appreciation
of life in a hard-won American voice, the antidote to fawning imitation and
authoritative replication. Philip Whalen once said that religions get weirder
the further they travel from their home, but I wonder if you aren’t giving
meditation practice a good name by not putting “legs on a snake.”
MIRIAM SAGAN: First of all, thank you. What a great thing to say.
Phil Whalen was a very important person in my life. My then husband Robert
Winson (died 1995) and I came to Santa Fe in 1984 along with Phil--they were
setting up a zendo. Phil needed cossetting--he wanted to eat hamburgers and
watch Dr. Who on BBC. We spent several years carting him about. He was never a teacher
in a formal sense, but I learned a lot from him. He'd mark lines in my poems he
hated with skulls and crossbones.
But what you are noticing is that I had
some poetic practice before I ever encountered Buddhism. As a child I'd had raw
experiences of just sort of accessing reality--they were surprising but secret.
At 21 I almost died from a lung infection and spent months in the hospital.
After that, reality as I knew it was very shaken and I went questing. Then
poetry came along and I tried to match experience with language. Ideas in
Buddhism--before that similar ideas in art (cubism, Merce Cunningham, John
Cage)--would sometimes line up with my experiences.
I'm always amazed/amused when
anthologized as a Buddhist poet because I've never thought of myself that way.
Maybe a poet who was around a lot of Buddhists?
KIRPAL GORDON: You were at Harvard (undergrad) or Boston U (grad) when your
lung became infected? What was almost dying like? Were you already putting out Aspect?
MIRIAM SAGAN: I went through Harvard in three years, and then didn't get into
graduate school. I was spending a year trying to turn myself into a community
based poet when I got sick, with what in retrospect doctors have told me was
most likely Swine Flu. I was writing, teaching at the Cambridge Women's School
and creative writing at the New England Conservatory of Music, and yes, had
responded to Ed Hogan's plea for folks to read the slush pile at Aspect.
I was a bit lost and vulnerable and had no health insurance--when the flu
attacked my lungs I ended up in the Beth Israel Hospital where pain/surgery/morphine/and ICU
induced psychosis put me into quite a different state from the intellectual/ political
one I usually resided in. I had some classic near death experiences (soul
leaves body, gates of light, etc.)--totally without context.
Months later when I left the B.I. I
thought--well, I'm never going to do this again...i.e. die. Then had to amend
it to "as an amateur." I went to the local TM center and got a
mantra! (You can tell this was 1976!). I sort of followed the expected familial
path for a bit--did go to grad school and stayed too long on the east
coast...ran to San Francisco finally when I was 26.
KIRPAL GORDON: Regarding your getting
anthologized with the Buddhists, you are certainly a poet who appreciates
economy of expression and a vision that includes the hidden compliment of
opposites, willing to embrace the spirit of a literary form without getting
caught up in the letter of the form. For example:
the widow’s short skirt—
gossip about who
wanted the divorce
open pit copper mine—
in every Gideon’s Bible
The Book of Job
you tell me these ducks
don’t always mate for life
are you flirting with me?
Taken from All My Beautiful Failures,
these sixty haikus published in your sixtieth year are not structured in the 5-7-5 syllable lines of traditional Japanese
haiku, but they match D.T. Suzuki’s definition: “A haiku does not express
ideas, but puts forward images reflecting emotions.”
MIRIAM SAGAN: My mentor in haiku was
Elizabeth Searle Lamb, often called the American "first lady of
haiku." She died some years ago, but she was practically a neighbor in Santa Fe, and even though we saw each other often
we also corresponded--by postcard and email. She really favored the soft light
approach to English language haiku, where lines are 5 syllables or less, 7 or
less, 5 or less. Towards the end of her life I asked her if she had any advice
for my students about haiku and she said, "well, I just do what I want."
That was after a lifetime of study, but I did love the remark.
KIRPAL GORDON: Here’s the one that really
stands out the most:
even in this
suburban neighborhood—
wild scat
It harkens back to your Seven Places
in America: A Poetic Sojourn, published by Sherman Asher the year before,
2012, and your skill at working the edge that Robert Smithson called
the“slurb”—the border ‘tween the suburban and the wild. Like many of the poets
in the Taoist-Buddhist-Shinto traditions of China and Japan, you wander our outback of geological
and historical sites and national parks.
MIRIAM SAGAN: As a child in N.J. I was kind of obsessed with the
idea of "underneath"--archeology, or the woods, something under a
suburban existence--powerful but hidden. Smithson of course was also from NJ.
Did you know William Carlos Williams was his pediatrician? How cool is that! We
once found a tiny chip of a Dutch tile digging a vegetable garden--I was as
excited as if it had been a Viking ship.
I had this strong romantic desire to get
"Out"--later heightened by leaving the east coast but when I really
settled in Santa Fe these opposites seemed less clear...I started watching the
boundary lines between things and it made me incredibly happy, even when some
of those things were negative. As poetic material, it first became clear to me
when I was writing about the Mexican/US border.
When I went to the Everglades in 2006 as an artist in residence in the
park I was tremendously excited--everything seemed like a borderline, even my
own mind. And yes, this state was created and heightened by solitude. I'm
hardly immune to the delight of feeling like a Chinese poet hermit even while
eating a tray of take out sushi from a convenience store.
KIRPAL GORDON: You end the book’s Introduction with an amusing
remark your father made when you called him from the Everglades, “Where is the nearest jelly
doughnut?”Reflecting on indicators of civilization, you conclude, “It is not
possible to shed the old self just by changing geography. But it is possible to
expand the self so that it includes not just a jelly doughnut but a more
permeable boundary between self and landscape—the terrain of a poem.” I thought
of Ol’ Lao’s wu wei principle, a model for Chinese landscape painters, when
reading these lines from “10,000 Islands”:
Mangrove roots
Coated in oyster shells—
This is a border
as surely as between Ciudad Juarze and El
Paso del Norte
Between sleep and waking
Between the evening star and his wife the
morning star
Between the living and the dead
This is the border
Between land and water
That first division
After darkness and light
And these lines from “Shark Valley”:
past fifty myself
I’m still trying
to perfect the mix
of getting somewhere
and being there…
And the last lines of “The Folly”:
Pastel, the edge of rundown town
In the rain
Buildings painted pink, lavender, pale
green
By the prison’s razor wire
And the truck with melons.
And along the side of the road
The poor go on walking
As they do
Everywhere.
The poetic line functions as the permeable
boundary (intermediary? dissolve unit?) between self and scene. What a way to
limn a landscape!
MIRIAM SAGAN: I had a map tacked up on
the wall. The Everglades has three non-contiguous sections. I'm
not a bold driver, and I'd freak out in Miami traffic, but I was determined to see the
whole park. So it was a very physical process--crossing in and out of the park
and the highly contrasted south Florida. A white knuckle experience in traffic!
But it was good poetic practice--not getting stuck in one place or point of
view.
KIRPAL GORDON: Another quality most
admirable in these sojourn poems of a more or less chronological sequence from
2006 to 2009 is that your three-line observations placed side by side actually
build a narrative. I’m thinking of your “Sketches in a Notebook”:
a lizard
living
in a rolled up shade
child pats the palm tree
ignores
the alligator
tree snail gleams
in the leaf’s canopy—
stolen ghost orchid
MIRIAM SAGAN: Adding in the sequences of
the three liners helped me continue that practice of brevity. In a way, what I
was seeing in unfamiliar and remote places both had narrative and
stop-on-a-dime moments of perception. I've always felt a tension in my work
between these two streams--interestingly adding the prose essays and integrating
the three-liners so they are a kind of haibun helped.
KIRPAL GORDON: Your next sojourn is in
your own New Mexico backyard, “forty acres of land, pinon and juniper,” what
you called “the familiar made strange.” I liked the opening line of your
seven-sectioned “Laundry Line Koan,” “Nothing is blank, darling.” Here’s “2. Two
Blue Circles”:
The artist
Wanted to plant
A circle of bluebonnets here
But they wouldn’t grow
In the desert soil.
Instead, he constructed
A circle of blue grass.
The neighbors were meth addicts
Hard characters, who yelled
And fought. When the screaming started
Their children went into
The circle of blue grass—
Stood in the center
Of a safe place.
Another artist
Also wanted to build a circle
On the land.
He sent exact
Specifications by mail
Dimensions to be raked
Into the earth.
But this did not create
A perfect circle in sod.
Rather, it evolved, and a gopher
Dug a hole in the perimeter.
Then it rained
And the circle’s interior
Bloomed with flax.
The circle was filled with blue flowers.
A third circle,
Drawn on blue chalk
On the sidewalk
By me as a girl
Washes away in the rain.
You describe The Land/An Art Site as “an
artistic incubator.” In terms of context, “Two Blue Circles” is part of a
poetic map or on-site installation? It also calls to mind Robert Smithson’s
remark, “Earth’s surface and the figments of the mind have a way of
disintegrating.”
MIRIAM SAGAN: Installations on The Land
are low or no impact. I never saw these circles, just the remains of one but
heard the stories. The stories were more permanent. Also, they reminded me that
the rural isn't bucolic--it can be crime ridden and harsh. But also that art
has almost magical qualities to save a person.
KIRPAL GORDON: The Santa Fe River, “designated America’s most endangered river,” is your next
“pilgrimage” site. Comparing “the mighty Hudson River” you knew from your NJ childhood with
the dry river you know from adulthood, you show us “Randall Davey Audobon Center”:
Walled garden set
Among dry hills.
Fountain, a simple stone
Bubbles over—
Talking water
Out of the living rock,
Hummingbird,
Orange-tipped winged black butterfly,
Yellow butterfly on a field of lavender,
Yarrow.
Like any Impressionist
I sit on the bench in my straw hat:
Creation is born
Of name and water.
You write that “water fills my dreams.
When I was pregnant and after my daughter was born, I often dreamed of us in
the water.”
MIRIAM SAGAN: Well, I was a water poet
before I came to the desert. As a child, the Atlantic ocean--Jersey shore, Cape Cod--was basically the only access I had to
real natural beauty. Well, maybe the Palisades too on the Hudson River. All water. When I was four years old I saw the moon rise over Cape Cod and realized--I'm seeing something
beautiful. It was the first time my experience had an aesthetic label. So the
high desert was a bit of a shock. The land really scared me at first. I once
couldn't hike across some basin land but had to follow railroad tracks--it gave
me agorophobia.
KIRPAL GORDON: The Petrified Forest in northern Arizona is your next stop. In “The Tepees,” the
first section of “Views of the Painted Desert” you write:
Sunrise over the Painted Desert
Dawn’s striations illuminate
Colored hands of the Chinle Formation
Lava cap, white sandstone, dark red iron
stained siltstone
Red house of hematite
And the dark carboniferous layer of life.
Pangaea broke and floated south
You might name these layers of sediment
Call them:
The trip we took in 1965,
The year my heart broke,
The day I moved to San Francisco,
The wedding day, the cremation,
That nice time we had
With the kids in the motel swimming pool,
An east coast rainy afternoon.
The present sits on top
I’m here alone
Where earth has pitched her tents
Where wind wears things down
And continental drift
Builds things up.
Rolling in and rolling out
The low sea is gone
For the moment
Or eon.
What was it like in your cabin built by
the CCC back in the 1930s? Did you choose the Petrified Forest National Park or would you say it chose you?
MIRIAM SAGAN: I'm constantly applying to
the parks for residencies, but they are difficult to get. So yes, you could say
it chose me! Plus it was a special place in my childhood. The cabin was small
but comfy--except that the doors rattled all night long in the spring wind. I
was essentially the only person IN the park--rangers were housed outside. So it
was very intense at night--if crowded by day! The park staff was wonderfully
helpful, and took me to see some amazing things.
KIRPAL GORDON: In “Secret Garden Trail,”
at Stone Quarry Hill Art Park in Cazenovia, New York, you write:
Why must inspiration be a visa?
Remembered peonies are beaten down by
rain
Into their impressionistic essence.
A formal garden in the mind’s eye
Blurs in all this mist
And the dark alley between trees
Is scattered with pine cones, cinquefoil,
trillium.
In a sculpture garden
Even the mushrooms
Seem placed on purpose.
Once, half-lost, I turned into a
cul-de-sac
And saw through a gap
A pond full of water lilies
In all directions---
An inner self
That also shifts shape.
These lines struck me as a sort of Ars
Poetica for your project. The poems in this section, which include meditations
on Elizabeth Cady Stanton at Seneca Falls and a field trip to the Oneida community, are also part of a “Poetry
Field Guide” commissioned by the Art Park?
MIRIAM SAGAN: I went off to this
sculpture garden in upstate New York with a full project in mind. I wanted to
make a "guide" to the sculpture that was a poetry pamphlet...you'd
stop and look and read, like a version of a museum guide. But the map of New York was overexciting and I started to
include all kinds of visionary and utopian social movements from the 19th
century. So the park itself became a kind of paradise inside of a landscape
housing more ideal visions. The pamphlet, which was given away free to several
hundred visitors, isn't identical with the section in the book, though--dropped
some and yes added some too.
KIRPAL GORDON: The great earthworks of
native civilizations in the American southeast and midwest, including the
mounds of Cahokia along the Mississippi River, become over the next two years, your
sixth sojourn spot. Once again, all the poems in this section moved me, but
your lines about middens, those mounds containing shells, animal bones and other
refuse that indicate the site of a human settlement, struck a deep chord:
Shell middens
haunted my childhood
Where were
they—those great piles?
Left behind by
people older than my grandparents
And long gone.
On the beaches of
what will be Manhattan
Or in the Everglades mangrove swamp
of standing trees
How people who never saw mountains
Built them, platforms for the gods
And there are others too
Beneath the earth
With the bones arranged
Tidied for re-birth
Motif of the bird of prey
The mortuary mounds
That in this light seem so benign
Seem to swell away
In a sea of grass
Where you can picnic
On Memorial or Father’s Day
And not have to ask
What is underneath
As in the other sections, the call to dig
under the surface of things never had a more apt metaphor. It seems both a
personal statement as well as an artistic one about life in the USA. Do you think as a nation that we’re in
flight from the past?
MIRIAM SAGAN: A good question--I'd say
we're more in flight from the TRUTH about the past. We have patriotic or ready
made histories--I was raised on those in elementary school. And then there is
revisionist history, which attempts to right wrongs, but which can limit things
too. I'd say we lack a mytho-poetic past. Whose past is it? How can it be
everyone's in some authentic way? Hart Crane's "The Bridge" is a good
example of attempting this, but poets concentrate more on individual histories.
I was raised on tales of the Classical world and that is kind of a pagan
alternative to the present--I'm still searching for richness in what underlies
contemporary America.
KIRPAL GORDON: The Andrews Experimental Forest in the Pacific Northwest is your final destination. Here’s “A
Different Forest”:
The woman at the hot springs
Asks what brings me here
I say I’m staying in the forest
But she mishears
And thinks I’ve come to visit
A local boy named Forrest
Who lies unconscious in the hospital
After a terrible car wreck.
I don’t want to be reminded
Of the descansos on old Las Vegas Highway
Four crosses in pastels and purples
For the kids killed that night
By a drunk driver
Or the sound my daughter’s friend made
When she heard,
A sound beyond weeping.
Logging trucks go by in the midst
Like a line of oversized hearses
All round me
The forest is awake
With its moss-draped yew trees
Its beetles and fungi stirring in a tree
trunk
To ferny soup.
Only I am sleeping.
That last line seems properly ambiguous,
and it’s here in this old growth forest setting in the lower Cascades that you
write, “I felt the intersection of humankind and the wild.” You conclude your
prose remarks with, “The forest itself was of course a vast compost. And so it
seemed was my imagination.” What a hopeful way to end this seven sojourned,
cross-country adventure.
MIRIAM SAGAN: Thank you! The sojourn in
the forest was utterly refreshing. It was also a dark time of year--autumn
headed towards winter solstice. Although the experience was one of decay and
death it was also peaceful and fecund. I didn't realize I was writing this book
until I was at Andrews.
KIRPAL GORDON: In addition to having
published 23 other books besides Seven Places in America and All My
Beautiful Failures, you lead an active life as a teacher, poetry advocate
and founder/director of the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College. What has that been like and do you ever
think of retiring?
MIRIAM SAGAN: The activity that really
speaks to me right now is text installation. I've been working with sculptors
and other artists to put poetry in some unusual or unexpected places. Recently
collaborated with textile artist Alisa Dworsky on a large piece that floats up
a wall and a series of doves with text with ceramacist Christy Hengst. These
were shown lats summer at 516 Gallery in Albuquerque. Right now I'm trying to initiate
"Haiku in the Hood" which will look like road signs. I lie in the
bath tub and get dozens of ideas, jot them down, and try them. Some heavy
lifting here--these projects take more time, money, and collaboration than
writing a book but I find it thrilling.
If I ever retire from community college, my goal is to do more installation. Poets
don't exactly retire of course from poetry. But I'm aware that at 60 my time
and energy have limits--I'm try to discover and engage these limits.
Creating the program at Santa Fe Community College has been wonderful. I based the
curriculum on what I thought and observed students were drawn to and needed.
The program includes visual arts, a one on one tutorial, and a literary
magazine internship. I drew a lot of what I knew--from Harvard to my small
press roots--together to share it.
KIRPAL GORDON: How can readers at the Giant Steps Press blog stay
in closer tough what all of what you do?
