A Conversation with Jeanne Murray Walker

An interview by Ben Palpant | Words Under the Words No. 15

Pick up any language by the scruff of its neck,
wipe its face, set it down on the lawn,
and I bet it will toddle right into the godfire
again, which—though they say it doesn't
exist—can send you straight to the burn unit.

—from "Staying Power" by Jeanne Murray Walker

My eldest daughter, in college at the time, introduced me to Jeanne Murray Walker. I was immediately impressed by Walker’s attention to the poetic craft. I wrote to see if I could buy a signed copy of her book, Helping the Morning, as a gift for my daughter. Walker gladly obliged. That was the start of our correspondence. When we finally got to enjoy a focused conversation all these years later, it dawned on me that I had never told her how much I appreciated her craftsmanship. I said, “Jeanne, fairly often, I’ll read a poem that strikes me as rushed, a little too off-handed. Your poems feel like the work of a craftsman.”

“Thank you,” she replies. “It probably started with my long habit of practicing the violin, actually. As a child, I was easily bored. Some days, mostly in the summer when I wasn’t in school, I would spend four or five hours practicing exercises or working on the cadenzas of the great violin concertos. I learned that to have any hope of performing on the stage required hundreds of hours practicing scales and arpeggios alone in a small practice room. It might also have had something to do with the fact that between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, first my father and then my older brother suddenly died. I did not find the comforting words of my Baptist church helpful. And I did not find English a useful language to discuss any of it. But I did learn that it’s possible to use a language other than everyday transactional English to express the truths that go on in and between us. This is the language of poetry and it is often the language of the spiritual world.”

“That discipline has remained an important part of your writing career.”

“Yes, believe me,” she replies, “to get beyond a beginning level, a poet needs to learn craft. When I was teaching in Orvieto, Italy, I got to know a wonderful poet, Hannah Armbrust Badia, who is married to a cobbler. An actual cobbler! He takes measurements of peoples’ feet and cuts specially prepared leather and stitches it to fashion mind-bogglingly beautiful—and very, very expensive—shoes. He spent years learning to do this and has dozens of tools in his shop to help him. He makes shoes; she makes poems. They both spend their days shaping material through hard work and discipline. I don’t know whether there is such a thing as an ideal shoe (if there is, it’s surely Italian), but I do believe that to make a poem in some ways is not unlike making a shoe. It requires craft and patience.”

“I don’t think young writers count that cost very often,” I say. “I don’t blame them; it can look so easy from the outside. But craft involves a lot of study, a lot of time. A lot more than we think it will take.”

“I don’t believe poetry springs from momentary and unpredictable inspiration,” she says. “It arises out of solid knowledge of the fundamentals of language and attentive practice. After reading poetry with careful attention and love for many years, I believe poetry is as much the product of hard work and skill as it is of inspirational flash. I figure if I put in the time and practice, eventually the Muses will give me a gift: I will write something better than I know how to.”

“You mentioned the loss of your brother and father. Their deaths must have had an enormous impact on you.”

“Those deaths did have an impact on me, of course. I suspect they registered deeply. My father had the kind of heart defect that can now be fixed with a simple procedure, but the surgery was just being invented when my father needed it in 1957. He knew about it and flew to the Scott & White Clinic in Texas for a workup, where he was given a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the surgery. My parents didn’t like the odds, and he didn’t go back for surgery. And as for my brother, he had been a serious asthmatic from the day he was born. My mother, who was a nurse, kept him alive through her skillful care until he was eighteen. He wanted to go away to school and finally she, who had protected him so long, permitted him to leave her. He died during his first week away at college. My own take on this has always been that we were fortunate to have him as long as we did.” 

“Did you wrestle with God after their deaths?”

“You know, I never asked whether it was God’s fault,” she replies. “I’m not even sure what it means to say that something is God’s fault. In any case, I don’t believe it was those tragedies that caused me to wrestle with God.”

“Still, a kind of darkness,” I say. “Seamus Heaney wrote, ‘I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.’  Is that true for you as well?  If so, how?”

“I wish I knew what Heaney meant. Maybe he meant that language is actually fairly useless at connecting us to one another or even to our own pasts. Maybe all of us live in a kind of linguistic darkness. But even so, at least when the poet makes a rhyme, she is recognizing and echoing herself from an earlier line. In that way, rhyming offers the poet a way to be in touch, at least with herself.”

“You mention rhyming. Traditional forms have been an important part of that exploration for you.”

“Yes,” she says. “Form has been an enormous ally. I have often felt that, if the Muse is working, the forms of poetry can help me discover what I’m thinking.”

“Only if the Muse is working?”

“If the Muse isn’t working, just forget it; you’ll just have a dead sonnet on your hands. I say this after slowly writing a book of sonnets, Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking, which came out a couple of years ago. Writing those poems taught me a lot about the language.”

“Like what?” I ask. 

“Well, let’s stay on rhyme for a moment. While helping the poet find words for a poem, rhyme also allows a poet to see what she thinks. That is, in Heaney’s words, ‘to see myself.’ Or to put it another way, the poem, and especially its repetitions, make the poet’s own thoughts visible to her as well as to her readers.”

“Your work lives in a tension between an ideal version of the world and the uncomfortable, often frustrating reality. Is this partly why you write?  To explore possibility and wholeness in a fragmented world? Does that make sense?”

“Yes, I think I know what you’re asking,” she says. “There are many poets whose work lives in tension between the visionary and reality. At least that’s what the reader sees after the poet writes the poem. I’m not so sure that’s what the writer was aiming for, though. It may be disappointing, but I don’t have any such noble reason for writing poetry—for example, to sustain the possibility of wholeness. When I write, I’m not aiming to sell a point of view like ‘wholeness’ to the reader. It would be more accurate to say that I am, like the reader, a seeker. I write poetry because I’m fascinated by what the language can do—though that isn’t entirely it, either.”

“We’ve talked about the discipline involved in the craft, but does this fascination lead to playfulness, too?” I ask.

“When I first saw someone playing a massive pipe organ with not only a keyboard, but all its knobs and stops and pumping the base pedals, I thought that’s the way it is when someone’s writing a poem. You play the language. It’s fun and you’re involving the whole complicated language. All the possibilities in English are available to you. The only way I could understand Wallace Stevens, I found, was to think about his poetry that way. His work is deadly serious, but it’s rooted in play.”

Recalling some of her best poems, I say, “I have always been struck by your metaphors, Jeanne. They arrest my attention. I experience a kind of revelation when I encounter them.”

“Thank you,” she replies. “Several years ago, after reading a lot of poetry, I began to wonder whether many of the metaphors poets have used—at least in the poetry that has lasted—have worked so well because normal people just regularly think in metaphor. I don’t mean that we go around awkwardly decoding the world, thinking ‘Oh, I see, a light stands for truth and goodness. And if the light flashes on the shore in a dark night, it means home.’ No. Metaphor, that kind of equivalence, works pretty naturally for most of us, and we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. In other words, maybe it’s not the poet who sets up the ‘revelation’ that one thing equals another. It’s always been there and when the poet points it out, people grasp it and say, ‘Oh! I see.’

“Speaking of metaphors, one of my favorite lines from your poem, ‘Staying Power,’ is about how words, left to their own devices, will ‘toddle off into the godfire.’”

“I wrote that poem about fifteen years ago for a regular Friday afternoon workshop with my friend, the poet Deborah Burnham. Every week for over forty years, Deb and I have exchanged poems with one another, either on paper or by email. We then spend a couple of hours on Friday talking about our new poems. Her remarks are without exception pointed and they are rarely wrong. On the Thursday I wrote ‘Staying Power,’ I had been teaching at the University of Delaware, as usual, and as I drove an hour home, I dimly remembered that I needed to write a poem for the next day’s workshop with Deb. I didn’t have any ready ideas. That fact didn’t trouble me, because I rarely ever get an idea for a poem in advance. I’m more likely to find a poem by fooling around with language. I knew I would have a little over an hour to write after I got home before the hungry thundering mob of my family would pull up at our dining room table and demand mashed potatoes and hamburger patties. Believe me,” she says, “I wasn’t writing as a philosopher or a theologian when I wrote those words. They were a result of playing with language.”

“That’s an encouraging anecdote,” I say. “Sometimes I’m so amazed by the flash insight that comes to some poets and I think that could never happen to me. You’re saying that I just need to keep playing with language as part of that slow, patient craft work.”

“Exactly. You never know what will come.”

“Did you ever consider pursuing philosophy or theology?”

“In college I took a course in philosophy and eagerly wrote about big subjects like the ones you are asking about; and several of my best teachers informed me gently that I was better at metaphor than at abstractions. The philosophers sent me over to the literature department. And after a semester studying literature and writing poetry, I won two Atlantic Monthly awards—which certainly validated their assessment. I am a poet and someone who can write essays. I’m not a scholar of religion, philosopher, or psychologist.”

“Your line about the ‘godfire’ lifts the reader into the realm of the transcendent. How does a poet make the leap from lived experience to transcendent revelation?”

“I’m afraid I can’t talk very helpfully about how I use lived experience to tell human truths. I can tell you that I don’t ever think about getting transcendence down on paper,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with doing that, it’s just not my gift. I wonder how many good poets these days hope to do that. We tend to write about ourselves, about the way we are caught in time, about our landscape and our houses and our lovers. And from that sometimes the transcendent flashes out. If you want to know William Butler Yeats’ poems, you need to learn about the town of Sligo, for example, even if there's a good deal about his poems that transcends Ireland. Think of Denise Levertov, a religious poet if there ever was one. Her poetry is entirely grounded in the particulars of her daily life, and yet her work is shot through with the transcendent. Even four hundred years ago, poets were not writing much about the ‘transcendent.’ Even John Donne, who was so interested in the transcendent that he later became a divine, seems to have wrenched transcendent revelation out of subjects grounded in the body.”

“Is this transcendent revelation a byproduct rather than a causal intent?” I ask.

“I guess what I’m saying is it’s not mainly writers who make the leap from lived experience to transcendent revelation, it’s readers. It seems to be a normal move for regular people to make one thing stand for another. In the case of any two given objects, the poet may be just the first to point out the connection.”

“Which brings us back to your comments on metaphor.”

“Yes,” she says. “Metaphor is the William Carlos Williams red wheelbarrow on which everything depends. The importance of the red wheelbarrow is something a writer absolutely has to learn in order to become a poet. Grab an issue of Poetry magazine and start reading, and you will find metaphor on every page. Using metaphor is part of the discipline of writing poetry. A poet has to talk in terms of objects.”

“Your comment about the reader experiencing the transcendence is an interesting one,” I say. “I think it was Christian Wiman who said that ‘poems are mysterious intrusions, things far greater than things I knew.’ Is that why the reader has that experience and not necessarily the poet?”

“Maybe,” she replies. “I’m just saying that we probably shouldn’t locate the meaning of the poem through the experience of the poet, because we don’t know what that experience is. And sometimes the poet doesn’t, either.” 

“It feels to me like your poetry is vulnerable without being embarrassingly confessional. Does the raw confessional poet do us a disservice by being so openly naked about experiences?”

“If a reader thinks she’s reading a poet who is doing her a disservice by being too confessional, she should put the book down and find another to read. Far be it from me to set up a rule for what experiences can be talked about in poetry, because different readers probably have different tolerances for that kind of intimate detail. But sometimes a poet who is ‘openly naked about experience’ can make the image of her raw experience work as a metaphor, which invites the reader into the poem. Think of Theodore Roethke who wrote, ‘I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. … I learn by going where I have to go.’ Those lines seem confessional to me, but not raw because they are so resonant as metaphor.”

“That’s a helpful distinction.”

“When I was younger,” she adds, “I read and admired the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and other women American poets who wrote in the mid-twentieth century. They were talking about cultural issues I understood. Perhaps because I’ve always hung onto my faith, I have never experienced the catastrophic despair those poets seem to have felt. But I must say, in both of those poets, what comes through most powerfully, at least to me, is not their own biographies. Interestingly enough, then there’s Emily Dickinson, who intentionally omitted most of the details of her life. Now her biography is being excavated for those very facts.” 

“Who has given you a helping hand over the years?” I ask.

“I owe my writing life to some very wise and generous teachers. I met Helen deVette when I signed up for her creative writing course at Wheaton College in 1962. She submitted my work to The Atlantic Monthly competition, which I won. The prize was a summer at Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont, where I met John Frederick Nims, who became my lifelong mentor. Later, he became the editor of Poetry magazine. He meant the world to me, opening many doors. My greatest help, though, continues to be my gifted workshop buddy, the poet Deborah Burnham. The two of us met as PhD students at the University of Pennsylvania and have been workshopping every Friday afternoon for forty-five years.” 

“Could you talk about your hopes for the next generation of poets?”

“I think the hope is that they will get down on paper the fleeting and astonishing truths of their own generation. Not that truth is different for every generation; it isn’t. But truth manifests itself in different ways and I hold my breath waiting for the way the next generation will use form to tell us.”

“What pitfalls would you encourage them to avoid?”

“The greatest pitfall, I think, is this: to imagine you can write poetry without reading it,” she says. “A lot of people think that way. After all, poetry is short. It sometimes seems effortless. And most poets—like most craftsmen—don’t talk a lot about the hard work it takes to make a poem. But imagine a baseball player who hadn’t even seen many games and doesn’t really grasp why he should.  Just imagine. He gets on the field. He’s playing shortstop. An easy grounder rolls his way and it bounces through his legs. The fans who don’t immediately want to kill him want to get up and leave the game. You need to know the game. You need practice. Is poetry any different in that way than baseball or the practice of law or becoming a singer? It’s work,” she says. 

“What are the personal habits you would encourage them to adopt?” I ask.

“If you want to be a poet,” she replies, “read every scrap of great poetry you can find in English, going back to before Geoffrey Chaucer. Take your time. When I realized that I needed to do that, I just signed up for graduate English courses, which laid out the great poetry. But you can get hold of an inexpensive history of poetry in a used bookshop. Or sign up for a history of literature course at your local college. As an important side note, if you want to study English at a college or university, you need to dodge literary theory. It has spread like weeds in English departments.  Just read the poetry itself and find some friends who are doing the same thing. Get together and talk about it. A shoemaker can’t make shoes without learning how they’re constructed; so learn how to make poems by studying how they’re made.”