Vo l . 8 N o . 1
145
Could you share with us where you feel most grounded in place and how that influences your writing?
of my husband’s customers. We flew out of Anchorage by float plane to this remote lake.
Swift: The place I have gone for many years, that seems to always result in some kind of poem, either the idea or some phrase emerges, is my cabin, which was passed down from my husband’s side of the family. The first time I went there was 1954 after riding cross-country by train from Rochester, New York to see this place my husband couldn’t bear to be away from.
Taylor: You have three new poems out in Poetry Northwest-Winter & Spring 2016. “Sometimes a Lake” is a poignant poem written shortly after the death of your daughter who lived in Alaska. It starts out: “To make up for the lost days/I go through each box as if it held/the secret to vanishing.” I find it incredible how you are able to produce such breathtaking work after such significant loss. Has this always been the case, and where do you think you pull your strength from?
Taylor: Could you describe what that cabin looked like in 1954 when you first saw it? Swift: I remember all the trees and Whitehorse Mountain and its glacier was right out the window, and the Stillaguamish river was there. I wrote a number of poems about the Stillaguamish Tribal Hatchery in The Tiger Iris. Anyway, after that trip, we moved here from Rochester, and other than a few years in California, have stayed in the Pacific Northwest— the longest here in Edmonds. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and spent a lot of time in the woods, so I guess this place just seemed like a grander extension of those early years in nature. Taylor: Can you share the way you typically create a poem from beginning to end? Swift: I think writing a poem is always different. It is a process in itself. I have taken poems that have been written in strict form, and yanked them apart and rewritten them loosely, and that has been very successful. One place I got a lot of jumpstarts for poems was at the cabin, something about the atmosphere there. I would start with two or three lines, and then more lines come, and finally I have a poem. Does anyone know what process the brain goes through? I have spiral notebooks full of poem starts, and sometimes I go back to them five years later and wonder why I abandoned it. Taylor: Many of your poems are set in Alaska. Can you tell us your connection to Alaska and why it is such a presence in your work? Swift: My older daughter lived in Juneau for 33 years. Mostly she flew down here to Edmonds. But I visited her twice, once with my Mother and then alone once. Most of the Alaska poems are rooted in fishing trips taken with my husband to Tebay Lake, which we were treated to by one
Swift: I wrote “Sometimes a Lake” two and one-half years after my daughter Laurie died. My only poem of significance since that event. A terrible loss I will probably never get over. All poets write from strong emotion. I also write to discover or get straight what happened. The poem is what holds it in focus. It contains it. I guess it’s true that writing itself is where I pull some of my strength from. Taylor: Tess Gallagher, when finding out about this interview, wrote “Joan is no pussycat—she plays hardball and deals with stuff others would not venture towards.” When I read this I thought specifically of your poems about your own rape, serving as witness for the prosecution against the man who raped you and then murdered and raped another woman, and the neonaticide poems. Could you talk about the concept of bearing witness to your own life through the creation of poems, and how that has impacted you? Swift: You mean talking about things other people would never talk about? These poems were written in the early 70s, and after the trial in the mid-80s. Hardly anyone was writing these types of poems then. I will always remember poet Dick Blessing saying “Is this what I think it is about?” and I said “Yes” and he basically just said “Wow” and that was the end of it. To be honest sitting in the witness stand was much worse than writing about it. But I guess I knew I had to begin exploring and investigating what happened to me. And soon after it happened, I did that by taking my car to Joaquin Miller Park in Oakland, letting the dog out of the car to run around, and I would sit in the car and write for an hour or so. So, I guess I wrote, as a way to understand what happened to me. I never thought it was a courageous thing, it was just what I needed to do. But I never really got any feedback on these poems once they were published. Maybe people don’t want to read these