A Conversation with Jennifer Wallace

An Interview by Ben Palpant | Words Under the Words No. 12

This post belongs to a series of interviews between Ben Palpant and important contemporary poets.

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"This evening there is nowhere to rest but in
the wind. A blue wind comes up through
the floorboards. An orange wind in the gap where
the windows won't meet the sills. These two
winds are complementary and therefore better than
the sofa where I can't sit because one side is empty,
outweighing my wish for someone there."

From "This Evening" by Jennifer Wallace

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by Ben Palpant

The story of how a poet found poetry or, more often than not, how poetry found the poet, is often varied. How they came to write what they write, how they grew in the craft—these journeys are unique to each poet. I think it’s this variety that gives us the encouragement to pick up the pen and write because the life we have lived—ordinary or otherwise—has ample material for poetic expression. Jennifer Wallace’s story, for example,  is uniquely hers, but her emotional responses to life events are common to all of us. We understand loneliness. We understand fear. We understand the beauty of birdsong. 

It seems to me that the best poets utilize their emotional responses as a doorway into mystery. That’s one reason why it’s important to acknowledge the value of our stories. The other reason is that God is telling the story, so it has inherent value. I started my conversation with Wallace by asking her about her story.

"Well, I was born just outside of Chicago, but my growing-up years were very transient. We moved every three or four years, which was unusual, and it had a big impact on my life. Of course, when you're a kid, you don't realize the impact it will have. It was a chaotic and problematic childhood. The benefit, I suppose, is that I got to live in many parts of the country. We did a lot of camping, so nature became a kind of solace. My human experiences, especially my parental situation, were untrustworthy, but I felt I could trust nature."

"Which must be why you keep veering toward nature in your poetry."

"Yes. Not to be too reductionistic, but Gregory Orr wrote an essay called 'The Four Poetic Temperaments,' in which he says poets tend toward image, music, narrative, or structure. Although I'm a mix of them, I tend to be more structural, and part of that is because I longed for structure growing up. Nature gave me structure and safety."

"So it wasn't simply that nature offered you quiet refuge, but that you found in it a stability that you couldn't find in human relationships."

"Right. It wasn't even that it was quiet—nature can be quite noisy—it’s that I got attuned to systems and interdependencies."

"I find that your poems about nature—and I suppose this is true of all nature poems—are always about more than simply the natural world. Do you set out to write a poem about something greater, or do you end up at that revelation during the writing process?"

"I rarely set out to write a poem. If I do, the poem usually ends up being a bad poem. The way it usually works is that something builds up inside me, and then I have to start writing. I write to figure stuff out, to take things apart and to discover why things are the way they are. I'm like a puppy who cocks its head at life. My poems are just my way of asking questions. The poems usually start with an image or a conceptual idea and then move toward the heart."

"An old teaching maxim says thoughts untangle as they pass over the tongue. This is why our students need to verbalize their thoughts,” I say, “but it's why we should also verbalize our thoughts. We're puzzling things out that way. For you, writing poetry is a way of untangling the questions in your mind." 

"Yes,” she replies, “it's an attempt to untangle, at least. Sometimes, I end up tangling things even more, but it's still an attempt."

"How do you decide that one of your poems isn't very good?"

"It's really an instinct I've developed. I sense it more than anything. If something feels right, then I trust that feeling. If it doesn't feel right, then I trust that feeling, too. Sometimes, I can justify the line or the poem in my mind, but something inside me knows I'm intellectually justifying. I need to listen to that instinct. Also, if I move into a space of certainty, where I can say I have made my point, then that's usually a bad poem. It's too tidy, too wrapped up. I enjoy writing nonfiction—I like the rhetorical argument—but that's not the purpose of a good poem. A good poem doesn't close; it opens. That's partly why I end poems with a question. They don't necessarily have a literal question mark, per se, but there's a question embedded in the language."

"Which allows the poem to open onto possibilities, rather than remain a closed system."

"Yes. When I was in graduate school, my friends and I decided to start writing experimental poems. They didn't attend to language or to sound or rhythm. I brought one to my teacher, who gently asked me what was happening in the poem. I told her that these were just my thoughts. She said, 'Oh, I get it. You were just holding a mirror up to your brain. I thought you were trying to tell me something.' I said, 'But I am trying to tell you something.' She said, 'I don't think so. It doesn't feel like you're talking to me.'"

"It sounds like you were hardly talking to yourself. That might have been an improvement."

"Right. If I had, she might have felt like I was talking to her as well. As it was, I was writing nonsense and selling it as good sense, and she saw right through it. They were bad poems because they didn't honor the holy trinity of poetic expression: sensual imagery, emotional content, and an idea. It's the way those three work together in unity that makes a strong poem or a weak poem. I had a wonderful teacher named Jean Valentine, who helped me in a thousand ways. I didn’t begin my committed writing life until I was in my forties, so naturally, I had many doubts about where and if I fit. Jean encouraged me by always pointing out the path.”

“What a timely guide.”

“Yes. I brought her a poem once about attending a huge clam bake. It described a magnificent day on Long Island Sound, and somewhere in the poem, I described the colors of the setting sun and the salt smell as ‘numinous.’ Jean wrote in the margin, 'I think you are going to have to make it numinous,' —a suggestion that put the responsibility on my shoulders in a way that the popular adage, 'Show, don’t tell,' never did. Also, Jean didn’t need me to do lots of narrative. She encouraged me to write with compression and minimalism. I have so many other stories about her. Jean’s alive in me!"

"The power of a good teacher is more than the information received from that teacher, don’t you think? The best ones shape our character and often send us down roads we would not have anticipated without them."

"Jean was definitely one of those!" 

"I hear you saying that powerful poems are more than mere self-expression."

"I think so. There's a million ways to write a poem. Sometimes, it starts as self-expression, but it usually doesn't stay there. I'm a little shy about saying you should do this or you're supposed to do that because I don't begrudge anyone going in a direction they feel led. I read a lot of poetry. I'm on several advisory boards for presses and journals, so I know within a few lines whether a poem is coming from a place of openness, whether the poem is going to move me. But not everyone on the board agrees. There are a lot of opinions out there that differ but aren't necessarily wrong. Some people care more about the themes of the poems, and the ideas they contain. I tend to care more about the poem's structure, whether it honors line and music. It's like painting. The subject can be just about anything, but what matters most is composition, texture, color, and movement—how the painter uses the paint or lights the subject."

“Do you see common errors made by young writers?”

“I think they also get confused about the difference between ambiguity and mystery. That's what happened in my younger years with experimental poetry. My poems were ambiguous, which didn't lend itself to anything but confusion and further ambiguity. It couldn't open onto mystery. People think that they want ambiguity, but they really want mystery. The road to mystery is not ambiguous; it's linear and clear. The word-to-object association is clear and understandable, and that's why it can lead us somewhere called mystery. Too many people are purposefully obscure, and it's unkind to the reader."

"Maybe there's a temptation to be obscure because it sounds profound. It obfuscates everything, but at least it sounds poetic. You're saying that, in the end, we're not actually saying much."

"That's right. If the poet doesn't know what she's saying, how can the reader? Even word impressions render the reader helpless. It's not that you should be able to reduce a poem down to a summary. I'm not saying that. But the line needs to be understandable in terms of the rules of language. Sometimes I don't know what I'm trying to say in the poem, but I'm still using the laws of language to communicate the subject of the poem, which is, often, my struggle to know. I'm acknowledging that I don't know. And I'm inviting my reader into that not knowing. That kind of writing is distinct from nonsense that just confuses the reader. You know what I'm talking about? Sometimes, you feel like you're invited into a room that the poet built so you can have a relationship, and sometimes, it just feels like the poet is showing off, saying, "Hey, look at this room I built."

"And nobody knows how to get in or out of that room."

"Yes, exactly. Often, when we're invited into a room, we recognize our own rooms and feel at home somehow. It's relational. Some poems are so confusing that relationship inside the world of that poem becomes impossible. Maybe because relationships require some degree of comprehension." 

"Who are the poets you find yourself returning to, the poets who built rooms that Jennifer Wallace loves to enter?"

"Rilke, Tomas Tranströmer, R.S. Thomas, George Oppen, Marie Howe. Howe is wonderful at focusing on the particulars. Blake said we should honor the particulars, holy and minute, and that's what she does. I am a big-picture person, not so much aware of the small things, but I admire people who are.

"I have to kick against your self-evaluation a little bit because you have lines like these in 'On The Camping Road:' 'Here I am among long leaf pines, along with my body and brain, together with sunshine and breeze shine and leaf crunch and mud slip, and the naked necked death birds circling way up high.' That's a pretty specific observation." 

"Okay, thank you, but that comes with training myself to be more observant over the years. If you went back to some of my earlier work, you would not find those details. I'm learning to look closer at the world, which is a sign that I'm being more intimate with creation."

"Which, I'm assuming, leads you deeper into mystery."

"Yes, it does. This takes us  back to ambiguity and mystery. This intimacy with the world doesn't lead to confusion; it leads to diamond clarity. However, what I'm crystal clear about is just how little I know. That's totally different from being in a muddle of confusion. Being confused and not knowing are two distinct states of mind. One can lead you places—namely, mystery—and the other leaves you stranded where you started. You know, the early Christian mystics talked about the cloud of unknowing. I think that's what they meant: being willing to suspend the pursuit of certainty so that possibilities open up. It takes courage to stand still in a place where you do not know something. We want to cover up, conceal our lack, but it's a beautiful place to be."

"What does it look like in your writing?"

"Well, it doesn't look like a word salad dumped out of my inner life, that's for sure. Some people do that, but it's not very kind. It's just confusing. It is about being specific and clear regarding what I'm exploring and what I don't know. Mystery is born out of clarity and specificity, never out of confusion."

"The key difference for you is between confusion, which is bad, and not knowing, which is a good place to start."

"Yes. This is the tension in life. We long to know God, but God is not entirely knowable. God must be a fan of our puzzlement."

"Certainly of mystery."

"Right. We need to embrace the puzzle and the mystery without having to explain everything. A poet should get comfortable with that space of not knowing. We all should because that is what God asks of us."

"And yet Christ said, 'When you see me, you see the Father.' So, in some respects, he's saying that God is knowable. Maybe what we're talking about is that God is not fully knowable, but that there are degrees of knowledge we gain over time. We long to know but can't know it all right now."

"Maybe. We do have that propensity for longing. We long deeply, and we want nothing more than to satisfy that longing. Maybe we're meant to stay in a place of perpetual longing. That's a potent place to be."

"Can I change directions here a little bit?"

"Absolutely."

"What do you hope you have accomplished by the end of your days?"

"That's a profound and amazing question. I just turned seventy years old, so I suppose I'm in the final quarter of my life—if I'm lucky. My father died when he was 77. Mom died shortly after. So I'm aware of where I am and how much time I have or don't have. I guess you could say that I'm growing more comfortable with uncertainty as I age, but I suppose that at the end of my days, I just want to have remained curious. I think that would be a wonderful accomplishment. I want to stay open."

"When you say you want to stay open, you're not talking about staying open in a moral sense, right? Wrong is still wrong. In what ways do you want to stay open?"

"My heart is a complicated place. There's a lot of self-protection there and closure and brokenness. Wasn't it John the Baptist who said, 'Lord, let there be more of you and less of me?' I think Mother Teresa echoed that. I want to be open in that way. Less of me and mine, more of Thee and Thou."

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Ben Palpant is a memoirist, poet, novelist, and non-fiction writer. He is the author of several books, including A Small Cup of Light, Sojourner Songs, and The Stranger. He writes under the inspiration of five star-lit children and two dogs. He and his wife live in the Pacific Northwest.

Jennifer Wallace's poems, essays and photographs have appeared in artists books, exhibition catalogs, galleries, museums, anthologies and literary journals. She has written several books of poetry, including Almost Entirely and Raising the Sparks.