What Others Say About J.C. Todd
“J.C. Todd’s poems are filled with lyricism and intelligence but with much that
I find so exactly right that I believe I own it. She seems to be made of decorum
and depth, and though I’m incapable of such quiet grace I covet it. “Beloved”,
she says, “your body/..will stop/your skin Stiffen into the canvas/of an abandoned
tent.” My god how awful and how perfect this is! For Todd, the body, ubiquitous
and rich is an elegant anchor- she can say men kissing and neurons, Dendritis,
and retes, she can say pissing and I feel I have been caressed and saved.” – Renee Ashley
“What I love about J.C.’s work is how it always surprises. Starting out with images
of wind, trees or snow, it may appear to be just another nature poem. God knows,
we don’t need any more of them. But then there’s a turn which shifts me into
a familiar state of unknowing, and it’s a bit uncomfortable.” Peter Murphy
THE INTERVIEW
Q. You have translated the works of Ecuadorian Poet Ivón Gordon Vailakis, Latvian Poet Amanda Aizpuriete and Lithuanian Poet Giedre Kazlauskaite. How difficult is it to translate works from one language to another and what drew you to translation?
All communication is a form of translation, from my mental figures and emotional colorations to yours. My physical experience to yours. My embodiments to yours. It’s a wonder there’s any agreement of meaning, even between speakers of the same language. So, yes, translation between languages is difficult in that its goal is to convey the poem whole into another language whose structures and history may not be sympathetic to the music and meaning of the language of the original. But the act of translation is also a chance to renew the relationship with one’s mother tongue.
Translation drew me because I wanted to destabilize my relationship to my mother tongue. I was of an age—late 40s—when I was concerned that I had grown too familiar with my personal use of English. I’d seen the work of other mid-career poets become elegant repetitions of their earlier work, beautiful but dangerously close to stagnant. I wondered if this were a neurological situation. Do patterns of structure and diction become so engrained that they short-circuit discoveries made through language? Poetry demands new language routes, new perceptual and contextual routes that drive thought beyond the predictable structures and strictures of grammar and rhetoric or that bend them to new uses.
I’d spoken American English since I was a year or so old and listened into it since I was six fetal months, the point in development when hearing begins. With almost fifty years as a speaker of English, it was time to loosen up by entering into another language. I had begun to learn and then lost Spanish twice before, so when I was awarded a poetry fellowship by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in 1998, I decided to study in
Quito, Ecuador. While there, I met Ivón Gordon Vailakis, a poet whose third collection, Colibríes en Exilio (Hummingbirds in Exile), had just debuted in Quito. We traded poems and soon she asked if I would co-translate this book, working with her directly and with her English-language translations. Eventually, I translated some of her poems independently and a number of these have appeared in The Bucks
County Review, The Drunken Boat, Crab Orchard Review and other journals. While I did not become fluent in Spanish, I gained enough of a foothold in its structure to begin to reinvent my relationship with English-language structures.
A few years later, when I edited a feature on contemporary Lithuanian poetry for the international poetry webmagazine, The Drunken Boat, I wrestled with a another dilemma: that of translating from a language with a small word pool into a language with a much larger pool of words. English has approximately four times the number of words of Lithuanian, or its sister language, Latvian. At first, having a larger pool of words to draw from seemed completely advantageous, but translation is not only a matter of the best word but also of preserving a sense of how the grammar supports and shapes the meaning, so translating was quite a challenge. I gave it a try because I wanted to include the work of a younger poet, Giedre Kazlauskaite, a student at Vilnius
University who had won a student debut award in 2002. We met at the university kavine (café). She brought her English-speaking poet-friend, Jurgita Butkyte, and English-Lithuanian and Lithuanian-English dictionaries. Over tea, we made rough translations of two poems. This modest project was a gamble for another reason: there was no hope of my learning Lithuanian, a complicated language whose linguistic forms are close to its root language, Sanskrit. So when I met Latvian poet Amanda Aizpuriete in Riga, and read English translations of her poems, I knew that translating her would present challenges. Amanda’s aesthetic depends on subtle tonal shifts. I wasn’t sure I could carry their register across into English, nor was I sure that I could convey the layers of history embedded in some of the poems, a history configured by centuries of domination by invading nations. Translating her is a work in process.
Readers can visit translation features I have edited or co-edited at <www.thedrunkenboat.com>:
·Lithuanian, 2:iv (Winter 2002)
Ivón Gordon Vailakis, 4:iii-iv (Fall-Winter 2004).
· Latvian, “To Be the Roots,” 5:iii-iv (Fall-Winter 2005)
· Slovenian, 6:iii-iv (Fall-Winter 2006)
Q. Over the years you have received numerous fellowships and grants both in the United States and internationally recognizing your work. How have these honors assisted in the development of your work?
Most awards offer financial support that makes projects possible. For example, one of the Leeway Foundation awards was in support of a specific project: travel to the Baltics, where I gave readings and lecture, wrote poems and made translations, then to Germany where I had a month-long residency at Schloss Wiepersdorf, an arts colony south of Berlin. Other awards, such as a state arts council individual artist fellowship for poetry, have allowed me to stop working for a few months at a time in order to write. An award that surprised me was a scholarship to the Baltic Center for Writers and Translators in Visby on the Swedish island of Gotland. Granted at the urging of the Latvian Writers Union, it allowed me to work in person with Margita Gailitis, the poet and translator who was my co-editor for the feature on contemporary Latvian poets in translation. I am heartened when I receive an award; not only is it a validation but also a reminder that the work is being read, that it might find new readers, that it might take unexpected directions.
Q. Pine Press released two of your chapbooks; “Nightshade” and “Entering Pisces”. Tell us about the chapbooks and where one may order a copy?
Each is a limited edition, printed on archival paper. Beautifully designed. The first edition of Nightshade is hand-bound and hand-sewn. What a shame they are out-of-print. Occasionally one or the other surfaces through internet booksellers, and Spring
Church may still have a few copies of the second edition of Nightshade (Spring Church Book Company, P.O. Box 127, Spring Church, PA 15686 / 1-800-496-1262).
Entering Pisces was published in 1985. When the publisher, Kerry Shawn Keys, invited me to submit a manuscript, it was the first time I had considered gathering my poems into a book. It seemed enough to write them—it still seems enough. Piecing together a manuscript from poems that had not been written with the intention of making a book, I began to listen to the poems as elements of dialogue that advanced a single action. I was looking for a dramatic structure without a literal narrative. The book is not themed but it is an emotional whole. The second book, Nightshade, began in a frenzy, six poems drafted in a few days at the end of 1986. I had just finished Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a long stretch, as I am a slow reader, over thirty hours of reading and drifting off, then waking. The barometer was falling; a redheaded woodpecker kept drilling the white oak outside the den, mining for grubs before the storm broke. The bird and Beloved knocked loose my own lost sister, dead in infancy yet growing inside me so many years. The core poems, my mother’s lament given in her voice, circle around the absence of her baby, my sister. It took many years to write the poems that completed the first burst, but Nightshade was a book from the start. Its shape emerged from the struggle between the lyric impulse and the narrative with the lyric subverting and interrupting the story so that grief could rise up and come to rest. Further disrupting the narrative, I have included a few poems from Nightshade in What Space This Body, changing the context in which they are encountered. I wonder how they will appear to the reader meeting them for the first time.
Q. As an associate editor of The Drunken Boat and several translations, what advice can you offer to poets submitting their work for publication?
My work as a contributing and associate editor has not involved reading submissions so much as developing projects. The Drunken Boat (www.thedrunkenboat.com) considers submissions by invitation only. Rebecca Seiferle, the editor and publisher, has made a vital, international space for writers like me to report from the field on our passions and obsessions with poetry.
As a poet who sends to journals with open submissions policies, I can suggest that sending out poems is initiating a conversation. You don’t know if the conversation will be picked up or if it will fall flat. Sooner or later, there will be a response. When it comes, you continue the conversation by sending again. When you read poems that speak to you, you continue the conversation by submitting to the journals or web magazines where they appear. It is so important to pay attention to your own aesthetic or thematic preferences in dialogue with those of the journals and books you read. Reading intensely is the baseline for this type of conversation.
Q. Who are your major literary influences?
I’m reminded of a book, People Who Led to my Plays, by the avant-garde American playwright, Adrienne Kennedy, which begins with “Elementary School: Fairy tales, My family, The radio, Jesus, My teachers, The movies, dolls, paper dolls, Hitler, Jane Eyre.” The final entry in the book, in a chapter titled, “A Voyage” is “Myself.” As it was with Kennedy, a multitude of people and places mingling in my thoughts and imagination have inspired and strengthened my writing and given it form. I’ll mention a few. My mother and her sister read to me from infancy, encouraged me to memorize poems and songs and later paid attention to my writing. Often around five o’clock—I remember this scene as if it were permanently winter: early dusk, wind at the window, the lamplight a patch of warmth in the corner of the sofa—my mother would read poems from Palgrave’s anthology, The Golden Treasury. It was her moment to settle into herself, between the day of child- and house-care and the evening of husband- and child-care. Thomas Hood was a favorite, also Shakespeare’s and Wordworth’s sonnets and songs, and that seducer, Herrick, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may/ Old time is still a-flying…,” whose lines I invoked when I was a teen on the verge, reading Whitman, Sandburg, Melville, de Beauvoir and the Jane Cooper poems that an uncle snipped from The New Yorker. The childhood of poems and the backyard garden and the beach where we went on summer weekends—the transformations in these spaces were at the center of my perception. There was no separation between world and word, between image and imagination. So the physical world has had a profound influence which I’ve been told is apparent in my poetry.
Other influences: poems given in the human voice, pop tunes from the 40’s on the radio, my uncles and aunts singing the pianola melodies of their youth. Medical dictionaries and handbooks. But this is not what you mean, is it?
I have read deeply and been struck to the quick often enough that making a list of influences seems to trivialize the impact of reading. During the years of writing the poems collected in What Space This Body, I have returned often to the work of Denise Levertov, to Whitman, to translations of the Greek anthology poems, to the work of Lucille Clifton, to the English Renaissance and Metaphysical poets, to Rilke, especially Edward Snow’s two volume translation of The New Poems, and to the philosophical writings of Gaston Bachelard and Teilhard de Chardin as well as turning to an array of popular science writers and naturalist-essayists such as Verlyn Klinkenborg.
Stirred by the poetry of Eastern Europe, now I find my gaze turning toward the violence and the silence between those who dominate and those who are suppressed. I am looking closely in the spirit of these lines by E. B. White about the irreconcilable differences between art and capitalism. His poem refers to a Diego Rivera mural commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller. “I paint what I see// I paint what I paint// I paint what I think, said Rivera.” To feed this newer work, I am reading George Steiner, Theodor Adorno, Paulo Friere and various wartime diaries and touching back to Mandelstam and Akhmatova, and to the poetry of Eleanor Wilner, Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us, especially the poem “Because One is Always Forgotten,” Ai’s poetry, particularly Killing Floor and Sin and, in Fitzgerald’s translation of the Illiad, the hail-and-farewell moment before battle when Achilles gazes on his shield, contemplating its images of peace-time civilization.
Q. You have traveled the globe presenting lectures on a number of subjects in various countries and universities. In addition you have worked closely with the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, New Jersey State Arts Council, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. It is apparent you enjoy sharing your work with others but also you take the time to mentor other poets and writers. Tell us of your experience traveling and working with others.
The maps and country entries in the1936 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica let me know the world was huge and teeming. They were my passport to everywhere else, yet, except for a summer inEurope and trips to California and Alabama to adopt my sons, I did not travel further than a few hundred miles from the place of my birth for almost forty years. Then Europe, the Andes, Mexico, Vietnam. In the future, who knows?
Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, Tibet, Hokaido?
I am not a good tourist, not a consumer of goods. Most of the travel is in connection with poetry: France, to lead a poetry workshop; Lithuania and Macedonia, to participate in poetry festivals; Sweden, to write and edit; Latvia, to translate and edit; Germany, to write, and then to lecture for the U. S. Embassy at American Studies programs in German universities; Ecuador to study Spanish.
Traveling, mentoring, translating: these are interwoven strands in a life-long interest in speaking across boundaries, an interest, by the way, shared by the Poetry Program of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation (<www.grdodge.org/poetry/>) and by the Cape May Getaway where I lead poetry workshops each January (<www.wintergetaway.com>). Borders are functional; the skin, for instance, is a permeable boundary that protects the body but also transmits sensation. It is not always in the best interests of humans to dissolve borders, but we can develop workable relations with the other side. Some of the poems in What Space This Body imagine human-to animal, human-to-plant, even human-to-mineral communication.
As for mentoring, what isn’t passed on, dries up. It’s a privilege to teach and be taught by my students, to make discoveries and recoveries with them. There is community in learning, just as there is community in reading and writing. For a number of years, I have been part of a remarkable faculty team in the Writing for College summer program at Bryn Mawr College, leading workshops in creative writing for high school-age young women from around the country and sometimes from abroad. Writing for College is a true community of writers in that we use our passion for writing and reading to make a space in which young women can value their intellects, emotional sensibilities and voices. (<www.brynmawr.edu/ summerprograms/ writing.html>)
Q. Wind Publications, (http://windpub.com/booklist.htm ), will be releasing your full length collection, What Space This Body in January 2008. The collection consists of several years of poetry, what inspired you to create the collection?
. In her poem, “Oh Look and See,” Denise Levertov writes of the transformations over the garden wall. That’s the stance of my book, the space which bridges the domestic garden and the wildwood beyond it. The speaker wants to enter into the transformations, to be part of the changes, much as Richard Wilbur describes in “The Beautiful Changes:” “The beautiful changes as a forest is changed/ By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it. . . .” Tuning to it, not only to beauty but to whatever appears before me that also appears in me—that was my inclination as I gathered poems and shaped them into this book. Initially I worked with groups of poems that seemed to cluster naturally, but that process diminished the possibility for dynamic tension. Once I began to look for new contexts for key poems, surprising kinships appeared, affiliations that might shift or shade a poem’s original intention. Although the poems had been polished and some published, they became new matter to me, matter I tuned to and then could reconsider and possibly revise. I thought of them as new land, not lands I was discovering, but volcanic lands created by eruption. Looking back, this seems a romantic idea, overweening and false, since I am not a volcano nor any type of landmass, a critical assertion against a too-common pathetic fallacy of seeing topography or geography and a woman’s body as equivalent. At the time of assembling the collection, however, the figure helped to disrupt the intentions I had for the poems. For example, this poem about the ocean and the priest-poet wandered off, becoming that poem about the sky and eventually the modest poem about enormous or perhaps amorphous mysteries at the far edge of consciousness.
The poems are making a context where “it” is inconceivable, where there are no objects, but only subjects. Isn’t that is what poetry is, what all art is—the locus of conjunction? Concurrently, the voice of the poems, that live-feed of consciousness into language, is rooted in the physical body. In the City Lights edition of Notes on Thought & Vision, H. D. asks, “Where does the body come in?” The poems of What Space This Body resonate with her question.
Q. Three poems in the collection stood out for me, “Endless Caverns”, “Under” and “Remembering”. Tell us about these poems.
If this weren’t a blog interview, I’d ask you to tell me about those poems. Isn’t a poem often more, or less, or other than what the writer thinks it is? Suppose my comments crimp the poems or shape them into Grade A Certified patties for the reader to consume hygienically? This is my hesitation. Instead, I’ll describe the circumstances, as I am aware of them, that initiated each of the poems.
“Under” had two moments of initiation: a dive off Marathon Key in
Florida and my re-reading of the dive log many years later. In addition to notes on the time and length of the dive and ascent, the depth of the dive, pre- and post-dive tank pressure readings, and so forth, the log listed fish and corals and reported that I was almost struck on the crown of the head by the bow of the boat pitching in surf as I descended on the anchor line. Yet the journal from that trip rhapsodized about the fish and the camaraderie of campfires and disco bars and a romance blooming between two other divers. There was no mention of the split second of danger. The disjunction (or conjunction?) between near disaster and sheer pleasure set the poem in motion. I wrote “Under” just as I was coming back into language after the first trimester of pregnancy when it had been difficult to speak and write clearly. It seemed that language had gone under. Carolyn Forche had read at a poetry festival in
Harrisburg, where I lived at the time. I wanted so much to speak to her and couldn’t put two words together intelligibly.
“Endless Caverns” found its final shape through a collision of unconnected moments. A photographer working on a National Geographic book about the Blue Ridge Mountains asked me to direct a powerful light onto the wall of a chamber in the Endless Caverns, a cave system near New Market, Virginia, while he shot photos. Then he shut the light down to photograph in the dark, using a flash. I’d noted the startle-effect of the flash in my journal as an aside amid pages of description about the cave formations, yet when I re-read this entry years later, it was the flash that triggered a poem. The poem couldn’t find its shape; the drafts flopped around, more like fish than caves, until, at a workout, a physical trainer gave me an instruction, “Float the tongue in the mouth,” and the poem crystallized around it.
What is it about “Remembering” that draws people in? When the composer Lona Kozik set it as part of a suite of songs for soprano voice, the music was lush, layered; I felt as if the text were ascending on carpeted stairs. Through her composition I could hear the motion of rising as the dramatic action of the poem. “Remembering” began in the multi-purpose room of an elementary school on a Parent-Teacher night. My daughter’s third grade teacher, Miriam Harlan, read aloud Robert Muench’s book, I’ll Love You Forever, and asked parents to write in response to the story. She refused to show Sheila McGraw’s whimsical illustrations, directing us to the pictures in our minds. In a few minutes, I wrote a fairly clear draft of “Remembering.” It is one of a very few poems that have arrived as gifts. Everything in the poem is true, and yet I could not say it happened except in my body as I was writing. Polishing it a few days later, fooling with end rhymes and line breaks—so you see it did not spring, like Athena, fully formed from the thigh or head of Zeus—I realized it could frame the poems of Nightshade. Until this moment, Nightshade had been the story of a mother; after “Remembering,” it was also the parallel but barely told story of her daughter, a daughter who lived, a daughter who thought she had indirectly compromised the life of her baby sister who had died. The story of the compromise would not be told, but its terrible power would infuse the living daughter’s voice, which would be the frame for the mother’s voice, which was the cradle of the baby’s absence. I’m grateful to Robert Muench and Miriam Harlan for realigning Nightshade and Beloved, which is also a living sister’s story about her dead sister and their mother.
Q. When “What Space This Body” is released you have readings and events scheduled. When and where will they be?
What Space This Body will have an auspicious first signing at the Book Fair at the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference in the New York City Hilton. The time has not been set, but it will be during the day between Thursday, January 30 and Saturday, February 1, 2008. If any poetry curator is looking for readers for their series, I hope they contact me. Other readings in the region are:
· Monday, 2/4 Robins, 7pm. Francine Sterle and J. C. Todd
· Sunday, 3/2 Manayunk Arts Center, 3 pm
· Wednesday, 3/26 US 1 Poets at Princeton Library, 7 pm
· Tuesday, 4/1 Poetry Round Table in Andover, NJ, 6:30 pm
· Tuesday, 4/15 McNally Robinson Books in Soho, NYC 7 pm. 3 Wind poets: Diane Lockward, Sally Bliumis-Dunn and J. C. Todd.
I will also be leading poetry workshops for elementary school students in
Havertown, PA and Southampton, NJ.
Q. As an educator, do you see the next generation coming of age embracing poetry as an art form?
That’s the only way to embrace poetry—as an art form. Anything else is verse or worse. Among the college and high school students I teach, I see a renewed interest in form, both experimental and received, and in merging genres. There is a sometimes rambunctious experimentation with diction, with sound bites, with fragmented or frayed thought in which narrative breaks off or diverges into wandering. For some students, there is a sense that language itself might fly apart. Others drive toward order in music and meaning. What matters most to me is their engagement with language.
Q. What would you prefer, a cheesesteak or scrapple and eggs?
How about steamed blue crabs and a pint of Troegs’ DreamWeaver?
What Others Are Saying About “What Space This Body” by J.C. Todd
“Here is the scared body Whitman celebrated, but taken to a deeper intimacy in both sensual and scientific knowing J. C. Todd can relish unblushingly the most interior matters of thebody, make language exude sensuality and a myriad rich scents, while keeping her head.So be prepared for a rare combination of daring material and meticulous intellect in thesepoems of arousal and awareness, and, above all praise.” – Eleanor Wilner
“Something of the verbal sass and sheer intelligence of Heather McHugh; something of the bodilyfascination of Sharon Olds; something of the natural reverence of Mary Oliver, and the naturalexuberance of Amy Clampitt; something of the philosophical ruthlessness of Louise Glick~and yet something altogether her own. An adored husband, a sister lost in infancy, and always the body, measuring itself against nature and against time, with eloquence and without hubris:these are the songs of “that small piece of gristle/ I sing with” The remarkable poems ofJ.C. Todd – Karl Kirchwey
“In her memorable book, What Space This Body, J. C. Todd writes with deep feeling aboutthe bonds between people, the oneness of marriage partners, and the ties between herself and natural things. She achieves a rare distinction in “Standing in a Winter Field Gazing at a Photograph of Ice” and “On the Beach”, tow poems in which she meditateson her own growth and on the world’s mysteries. Her poems are striking for a calmbut passionate tone, musical lines, and, especially humanity.” – Grace Schulman
To place a prepublication order for What Space This Body, send a messsage to the press, http://windpub.com/booklist.htm (use “Contact Us”). The cost is $15.00; the press will pay postage. Or use the postal address on the website, and mail the check and your request and mailing address.
The book will also be available at Robins in February.
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