charlotte FrieDman

visual grammar on the 72nD street subWay PlatForm

We stand next to each other in proximity you & me a pear & apple in some sallow still life lit by fluorescence you twirl your earring snap your gum your backpack the same color as the bubbles & flip-flops I bought on a whim because every girl needs pink shoes to step out & away in which you do & we move into juxtaposition our surface differences highlighted brown/white old/young hijab/Star of David & you raise yourself up on your toes again & again in relevés or out of boredom and I do the same as my calves need muscle & we make the most of our time waiting me behind you a superimposition my face your veil but all appearances are veiled with or without fabric & life’s repetition just might become a reversal if you put on my flip-flops & I slide into your red Nikes maybe we alter us & thus the world

laurel s. Peterson

inKWell intervieW margaret gibson

Inkwell had the great pleasure of interviewing Margaret Gibson, author of thirteen books of poetry, including the trilogy, Broken Cup, Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, and the recently released The Glass Globe. Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, she earned her BA from Hollins College and MA from the University of Virginia. She is the recipient of the Lamont Selection from the Academy of American Poets, the Melville Kane Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Connecticut Book Award, and she has been a Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and the Poet’s Prize. She is professor emerita at the University of Connecticut and has lived in Connecticut for many years. This interview took place as Margaret Gibson was coming to the end of her three-year term as Connecticut’s State Poet Laureate.

Laurel S. Peterson: Thank you for agreeing to talk with us. I’m looking forward to talking about your books and your projects as Poet Laureate. Let’s begin with your memoir, The Prodigal Daughter: Reclaiming an Unfinished Childhood, which talks about the process of growing up and leaving home— both literally and metaphorically—and how those contributed to your becoming a poet. In this book, there is a lovely scene of you sitting under a lilac bush for one long afternoon and coming to understand how much reveals itself to you just by being quiet. Being quiet seems harder and harder in our world with all its distractions, even during the COVID shutdown when it seemed that quiet was handed to us. How do you create a space for this quiet in your life, and how does it impact your writing process?

Margaret Gibson: Being quiet is both simple, and not. Being quiet is a making a return to one’s natural mind. To be quiet in a meditative or contemplative way asks you to slow the incessant drift of commentary and storytelling in your busy, reactive mind, often called “monkey-mind.” We sometimes call this drift of inattentive commentary “thinking,” but it’s not even that. Being quiet really means paying full attention to one’s breath, watching the mind—which includes the body—but not getting caught up in reaction, argument, contradiction, agreement, storytelling and so on. Being quiet means being fully present. Under that lilac bush, I was, at first, only hiding out from my family, finding a spot in which my sister couldn’t pester me, nor my parents direct me. At first, I felt the delight of naughtiness: no one knew where I was. Off by myself, I could think what I wanted, direct my attention to what pleased me. Gradually, there was a simpler quiet. As I simply paid attention to what I could see or hear, thinking about things vanished and physical sensation focused on the bird that alighted in the lilac and went about being a catbird, entirely without fear of me. It was as if I were seeing the bird for the first time, and I felt effortlessly related to it. As I watched, the quiet became less something I was “in” and more something I was being. That was it: I was just being—and “just” being wasn’t a diminished state; I felt more fully alive, larger somehow, more myself and less myself in a way I had no words for.

Poems are all about finding the words for the inexpressible. When you’re quiet in a contemplative way, you can tell if your ideas and responses arise from an original source within you—in other words, if they’re authentic, original, true to your own inner witness. That’s when you begin to write poems that are yours and no one else’s.

Laurel S. Peterson: It is so powerful to realize what is authentic in yourself, witness it fully—and accept it. I think that writers are such brave people because they take this work on willingly. In your introduction to Memories of the Future: The Daybooks of Tina Modotti, you write that you imagine her writing the poems “in the spirit of querencia, a gazing back through the distance toward home, toward various points of origin, when she had once again shaped a new life for herself…” This sentiment or this stance seems to mirror one that you take in The Prodigal Daughter, and also in Broken Cup. Can you talk a bit about how this stance has informed your work?

Margaret Gibson: Querencia is the Spanish word for that gazing back into the distance toward home that a retired and aging bull engages in once it is put out to pasture after its vivid, dangerous life in the bull ring. The bull stares off in the direction of its natal place, or first home. Is querencia a longing for home? A way of meditating on one’s life? A way of measuring how far one has come from a point of origin?

Querencia strikes me as metaphor for . . . being quiet, attentive, open, receptive, all this in the service of memory and inquiry. The question is not so much “Where is home?” but What in us is “home?” What is always there? What comes from nowhere and is inseparable from the wind, the sky, the stones? How does gazing at that which does not change . . . change us?

Before she left Mexico, Tina Modotti asked herself in a journal whether anyone really “changes.” Since change is a natural process of being alive, she must have meant a more dramatic change, something like conversion. As I see it, Modotti’s life was one of radical change. From being an object in front of another’s camera (she was very beautiful), she became a photographer herself: she engaged in active seeing. From being apolitical, she changed into a dedicated revolutionary. As she changed, so did her lovers. She changed countries, lovers, vocations, beliefs. Because many of the changes were painful, one could say she was a phoenix; she burned up in the fires; and yet as in the myth the phoenix comes back, reborn. But does “reborn” mean “changed?” As Yeats put it: “changed utterly,” so that “a terrible beauty is born?”

When I was writing both Broken Cup and Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, I was reminded of what Ramana Maharshi said, “Let what comes come; let what goes go. Find out what remains.”

I’m fascinated by impermanence, by what changes— and I’m also drawn to what “remains.” Querencia must surely begin with “not knowing” and with a willingness to investigate by standing still and letting what comes come. My poems often arise from a fundamental stance that combines memory and inquiry—and passion—along with a faithfulness to the present moment.

Laurel S. Peterson: That idea of impermanence must have also impacted the poems in Broken Cup. These are deeply personal, as they respond to and record the decline of your late husband, David McKain, from Alzheimer’s. I imagine that “faithfulness to the present moment” might have been particularly challenging work during this time. What was the necessity of this book for you? That is, was it a necessary work of memory? Or a record as you walked through those events? Or a way of holding onto love? Or…

Margaret Gibson: I didn’t write for two years during both the abrupt and gradual changes at home in the early years of his illness, just after his diagnosis. When I began writing again, I read the poems to him, and we talked about them. The poems were, of course, necessary as records of small, fleeting moments. They were an aid to memory as well as an aid to understanding what was happening to us. They helped us talk to each other—this before his language loss became such that we had to find other non-verbal ways of communicating.

It is one thing to witness your Beloved forgetting words and sentence structure, forgetting experience, and suffering the various cognitive disturbances Alzheimer’s causes. But because of my training in Zen, I was also asking “What is the Self? What is it really?” Is it what we remember? What we’ve achieved? What we’ve experienced? IS there a self? How is it constructed? How is it deconstructed? What remains when the “stuff” of self is forgotten?

These can be painful questions, of course, not simply intellectual ones. His illness gave them urgency. When personal pain is no longer avoided, when it makes you ask questions and wait for clarity, then pain is doing its work.

As for love, or holding on to it, the poems served as reminders that the one who needed my love was not the “historical” David of memory and accomplishment: that person was part of the past. David as he was now, that’s who I was asked to, and did, love. Writing the poems grounded me in the present and reduced my fear of inevitable losses to come.

Laurel S. Peterson: That resonates so deeply with me: that we are asked to love the version of the person that is present with us, not the historical version of them or our anticipated future version. That’s a wonderful thing to remember no matter where we are in life.

The poems that came out of your experience with David were collected in your trilogy, Broken Cup, Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, and The Glass Globe. They are shattering. What practice or lessons have allowed you to develop that vulnerability on the page (that so many are afraid of)?

Margaret Gibson: What is shattered, I wonder? Only the fictive notions about who we are. I owe any acceptance and serenity and courage I discovered during the eleven years of David’s illness and in the period after his death to my Zen practice and my writing practice. That doesn’t mean I didn’t have pain. It’s important to feel it, ask it questions, know it face to face. You can’t write about what you don’t know; you also must “not know” what you know. To write about difficult experience requires a willingness to take on difficult experience, assimilate it, learn from and transform it. No true joy is possible without that willingness. Otherwise, we’re just trying to separate out what we don’t like or don’t want. A willingness to let go of fear is also transformative.

Laurel S. Peterson: Yes, that willingness to take on difficult experience harkens back to the witnessing and being present that you mentioned earlier. Those seem to me to be both at the core of the writer’s work, and perhaps at the core of the Zen work you describe.

In the first book in this trilogy about David, Broken Cup, you ask, “What is this Nothing/ that holds me”— speaking of staying with your husband during his illness. In Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, this idea seems to come back in the form of a character named No One. “No One” seems to be connected to this idea: “And it’s essential to believe in nothing, to feel its presence,/its loving-kindness and vast aloneness, its love cry, its weight” (49). But in The Glass Globe, that “nothing” seems to turn into a something, a sense of being present in the world, despite absence. Even the last poem in The Glass Globe is about something—all the things that have been left behind. Did you intentionally create this tension between nothing and something, the embodied world and the spirit world? How does this tension feed your work and your life?

Margaret Gibson: It's important to understand what “Nothing” is and isn’t. In the poem “What Is It?” a friend asks me, “What’s to keep you from leaving.” And the speaker answers, “Nothing.” And what is this “Nothing?” No wedding vow, no feat of character will keep you faithful, keep you present. We are often victims of desire, whim, weakness—you name it. And besides, who wants to feel “held” or “bound” to stay by force?

So, the answer is “Nothing.” But nothing isn’t . . . nothing. Love flourishes in an emptiness in which the ego is absent, an absence that allows for a presence in which nothing’s left out.

In Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, I was writing during a period of David’s illness when he was in memory care or nursing care: not home with me. I was with him every day, but I was alone at home, lonely, and engaged in transforming loneliness and fear into a solitude that could be sustainable, creative.

In this book, both storytelling and prayer are ways of using words to create and clarify, to say what can’t be said any other way. In the prayer poems, the speaker does not use the word God, substituting for it, No one. The prayers are directed to the God-behind-God, the inexpressible, unknowable God—not the word God which, like a suitcase, we’ve packed with so many “meanings” and “definitions.” Paradox abounds. God is both Presence and Absence, in the same way that some contemplatives approach the sacred on the Via Negativa, others on the Via Positiva.

Interestingly, and inevitably, when one addresses

“No one” and talks to this absence with an open heart and intelligence, then No one takes on presence—becomes embodied, if you will. And in this process of addressing “No one,” the speaker takes on greater presence as well.

So it turns out that “believing in nothing” has a substantial effect. “Nothing,” as the poem “Passage” says, has presence, even a loving-kindness; it can be embodied.

The Glass Globe doubles the focus: the Beloved has breathed his last; the Earth is in climate crisis.

The shock of the last breath becomes, for the speaker of “Moment”, the experience of having breathed in that last exhaled breath herself, so that the Beloved is still part of her and part of this Earth. Personal bereavement is joined and deepened in this book by an environmental grief, sparked by global climate crisis, by the losses that have occurred, are presently occurring, and (if we do not change our destructive impact on the Earth) will result in the loss of Earth that sustains our lives.

In “Irrevocable”, the final poem, the verbal tactic is one of naming what has been lost or what will be lost, letting those losses (named and said aloud) have such presence that they re-create the Earth which has created us, and on which we have created art, culture, industry, community and so on—life in all its natural and social diversity.

In “Irrevocable”, the metaphor of “washing” the body of the Earth is a continuation of the actual washing of my deceased husband’s body, the first poem in the book. We know how to feel personal pain. We don’t know how to feel about the end of Nature, the destruction of the Earth as we know it. As a result, too many deny that climate change is happening at all. If poems have power, they teach us how to feel when we don’t know how to feel. Can you grieve for the Earth in the same way as you would a person, I wondered? I had this idea: Wash the Earth as you would wash the body of the beloved. Treat the global as if it were intimately personal. And so, in the poem I wash the body of the Earth as if for the last time. That’s the metaphor of the final poem.

Laurel S. Peterson: Thinking about the earth as the body of the beloved is a such a beautiful and healing image, a way to connect us all across the conflicts that divide. Perhaps metaphor is a less threatening way of approaching an issue that has sadly become so controversial.

You’re speaking a lot about your Zen practice. It seems to me that spiritual practice is also fundamentally about metaphor. Can you talk about how your spiritual and poetry practices intersect, and perhaps, have grown across this trilogy? As we move from the first book in the trilogy, Broken Cup, to the last, The Glass Globe, the poems seem to become more associative, less linear. Can you talk about the structural or stylistic changes in your work across the three books?

Margaret Gibson: As for spiritual practice, everyday life is my teacher now. And in everyday life there is no separation between the two practices, between spiritual exercises and writing poems. I like what you say about spiritual practice being fundamentally about metaphor. Metaphor is a verbal device whose focus is interrelationship, kinship, the gathering of what’s been separated (even shattered) into a whole.

Thinking, all by itself, often categorizes, divides, sorts, sifts. Consider the way we’ve divided body and mind, material and spiritual, ourselves and “Nature.” For certain tasks, skillful thinking is appropriate. But there are certain imponderable aspects of living one can’t simply “think” about. One of the strategies the mind has developed for drawing what has been separated back into relationship, into a unity, is metaphor, which takes two apparently separate things and finds . . . a kinship. Poets, more so than other language users, learn how to use language, song, and silence in a way that unites body and mind, presence and absence, word and image.

The poems in Broken Cup are, many of them, rooted in daily life, specific instances and moments that reveal the changes Alzheimer’s has caused. That clinical forgetting is offset by a clinging to a “moment by moment, breath by breath” way of living into the answers—especially when there are no answers. The poems in Not Hearing the Wood Thrush are grounded in the dominance of silence, (not song), darkness (not light), death (not further life), fuzziness (not a sharp-edged clarity). The poems that come forth from this are looking for change, passage—and trying to find passage by consulting myth (Orpheus and Eurydice), prayer (the No one poems), and by personal narratives that engage the speaker in ridding herself of fear and anguish. Story matters, words matter on this journey toward unconditional love and an embrace of mystery.

In The Glass Globe, the Beloved has died; the globe (both glass and actual earth) has a crack in it, but it still holds. The world the speaker inhabits has been changed utterly. She is “searching for another way back into her life.” Many of the “formal” elements of using language, employed in the two previous books, are relinquished and the mind that loves language is given more play, longer lines; it’s given loops and ellipses, associative lists and litanies. Words within words appear and become teachers. Inside flower . . . flow. Inside not knowing . . . now. The speaker is rebuilding a world, word by word, transforming absence into presence.

And for a poet, even a change in the line (its length, its placement) changes everything.

Laurel S. Peterson: Yes, I love that: that we can rebuild a world word by word in our work. So much of human work, it seems, is figuring out how to tell our stories in ways that empower rather than disempower us. You write: “To vanish is to live at the heart of the matter;/ to vanish is to live at the lip of invitation,/ embraced by emptiness and great joy.” (15) This seems like death, but it also seems like being absorbed into oneness.

Margaret Gibson: What we humans live with uneasily and want to deny is the knowledge that we will die. That “my” life will vanish. But to vanish . . . that is the way of things. And yet we resist this, creating a variety of immortalities: our children (passing along our DNA), our books, (passing along our knowledge), our accomplishments (ditto), the immortal soul itself (that loveliest of fictions.)

And yet to vanish is to accept the challenge of impermanence and live this “once”—this one life, the moment we have been given—as if it is a “once and for all.” To take up that invitation is to be truly creative. And, of course, alas, to save oneself one must lose oneself. To create, to live, to be . . . I must relinquish the well-defended ego, assent to being “No one,” find myself everywhere and in everything. This is to live with heart, “at the heart of the matter.”

Laurel S. Peterson: What wonderful, thoughtful answers. Before we go, I wanted to mention again that you are currently State Poet Laureate of Connecticut. What have the pleasures and projects of that position been for you? Do you have any new projects you’d like to talk about?

Margaret Gibson: There are many pleasures, but chief among them is being able to work with other poets in Connecticut in a close way, to strengthen the poetic community. I took “Poetry in a Time of Global Climate Crisis” as the social theme of my term as CT Poet Laureate, and with a grant from the Academy of American Poets I have been able to sponsor readings, finance videos, underwrite an anthology of 63 CT poets: Waking up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis. (Grayson Books). In my final months as Poet Laureate, I’m continuing that theme and also sponsoring readings by African American and Latina poets in CT. It’s crucial to understand that the same flawed thinking that underlies destruction of the climate and the earth includes the flawed thinking that creates separation of human beings by race and class. That flaw is to think in terms of division and separation. Divisive thinking asserts: I am “human,” therefore separate from “Nature.” So much damage flows from that erroneous way of thinking.

Currently, I am working on two new books. In one, I return to the strategy of persona. I’ve done this before, in The Vigil: A Poem in Four Voices, and in Memories of the Future: The Daybooks of Tina Modotti.

Draw Me Without Boundaries is a book that crosses genre lines, and there are two speakers: a woman isolated in a nursing home during Covid and her granddaughter, an artist who is living by herself, deciding whether to bring her unborn child into the world.

The second book is called Old Love—a book whose poems embrace “restoration” and new life.