An Interview with Susan Rich
In discussing her new book, Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry), the poet Susan Rich said it felt wild to be of an age where she had produced enough work to have a new and selected. She joked, “It used to be that you had to be Shakespeare to get a new and selected.”
Themes of time and change are threaded throughout our conversation, which is to be expected when talking about poems that span the globe and a lifetime of experiences. We touched on chutzpah and writing in community, and what is lost when memory fades. In noting what can’t be found even through online searches, we’re reminded that the digital world hasn’t always existed—it can’t be relied upon to corroborate the past—though many of us spend a good portion of our lives in the cloud today. Rich’s journeys through memory and time encourage us to keep a notebook and pen handy for recording what we might wish to revisit: an overheard conversation, a coastal road trip with a lover, or the next overseas adventure which, these days, is long awaited. ~GDF
This transcript has been edited for clarity and flow.
Gabriela Denise Frank: Before we enter your new book, Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems, let’s begin with an elemental question: how do poems work their way out of your skin into the world?
Susan Rich: Sometimes I begin with an image or a memory. Right now, I’m obsessed with the memory of a particular pickle barrel. These existed in my early childhood in kosher grocery stores. I have a memory of being very small, and being faced with one twice my size. When I asked my older sister, Ruby, she had no memory of it. I couldn’t believe she didn’t remember. It was this amazing thing! In my imagination, I still see the rough wood.
Often, the story behind something is what I find interesting. I’m working on a poem about Leonor Fini, a surrealist in Paris, who was famous for living with two lovers, being out as a bisexual in the ’30s and ’40s—and for having twenty-three cats. One of her paintings, “The Blind Ones,” was considered so erotic that, when she had a showing of her work, the curator required it be kept in a separate room behind a curtain. Gallerygoers needed special permission and had to be a certain age to view it.
What about the image of the pickle barrel calls to you?
SR: [Laughs] Well, I needed to finish the poem to find out, right? I’m not much of a fan of pickles, but it delights me to talk to you about pickle barrels. Really. Here’s something that has completely disappeared from grocery stores that used to be in the back by the refrigerator cases. It’s about the barrel and the ritual. Everything else in the grocery store is in a cardboard box or a plastic bag. Already packaged. But pickles were a whole different deal. My father had to get someone who worked in the store to pick it out for him. Morses’ was a pretty down-and-out grocery store, even when I was a kid. Now it’s no longer there. I’ve googled to my heart’s content, but it disappeared before the internet, and now [it lives only in] memory—another interesting idea.
When those of us who remember a place are gone, it really becomes a ghost.
SR: A couple of weeks ago, I told the poet Jan Freeman that I used to live in Western Massachusetts. I managed a used and new bookstore on North Pleasant Street in Amherst, Massachusetts. When Jan asked me which one, I went blank. I had worked there for a little over a year. I remembered that I didn’t like the name—I thought it was too cute—and we both tried to come up with names that were too cute. I started googling, but there was nothing. I tried so hard, but I couldn’t find the owner of the shop. Then I tried my CV, which starts in 1984; I worked at the bookstore in ’83. It was like, how did this place completely disappear? It was a brick-and-mortar bookstore for almost five years. Over the course of the day when I wasn’t thinking about it, The Reading Remedy came to me. It shows how we rely on the internet to be our memory. And how wild it is when it doesn’t work.
With time, even solid things become ephemeral; they turn into gaps or silences. Can you talk about how silence works in your poems?
SR: Silence is very familiar to me. Although I had older sisters growing up, they left for college when I was nine and never came back again except for brief visits. In many ways I grew up as an only child. My mom worked. I spent a lot of time alone, a great deal of time reading. The main Brookline Public Library was my favorite place. I spent a lot of time there. Silence feels very comfortable to me, very peaceful.
One poem that deals with silences or alternative types of communication is “Ghazal for the Woman from Vitez.” This is an early poem about my first time in Bosnia and Herzegovina working for the Office of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Vitez is a town in Central Bosnia . I was walking there with three other OSCE workers who were also going to be supervising the first-ever Bosnian elections. Suddenly, this woman came out of her house and just kind of scurried us into her yard in a way that would never happen in this country. She pulled us in, talking a mile a minute in Bosnian. Then her husband comes out and they’re both bringing food, and they’re showing us the garden, and it’s all being done in gestures and goodwill. I am sure they knew we were foreign, and perhaps that we were there to support the elections. We would have been seen as a kind of peacekeeping organization. Never mind that none of us had ever worked an international election before. I don’t know that this experience was silent exactly, there was far too much laughter.
I do find that silence is underrated. I have friends who can’t be alone, or they always have music or the television on. I can’t imagine poetry without silence. I can’t imagine being able to write. Some people have music they listen to, and I do that once in a while because it does change the work, but mostly I want silence. Silence…and a cat.
In “Detection” you write This was the understory of our lives— / creation and caution. We were archeologists / of the unspoken. The unspoken is a different kind of silence. Here, it relates to Judaism.
I was writing with my friend, the poet Elizabeth Austen, and some prompt started a poem called “Pregnant with the Dead.” The prompt had nothing to do with religion or pregnancy, but that poem [was] a portal for me. It was the beginning of thinking, okay, Judaism is something that’s part of me, even though I can’t claim to be an actively practicing Jew. For many years, I avoided writing about Judaism and my family, not because it seemed too difficult, but because it seemed too boring.
I grew up at the far edge of the post-Holocaust generation with relatives who had hidden in garbage cans to survive and [who] had escaped rape by being bandaged to pass as lepers. The old country stories always ended with the same piece of implied advice: don’t trust anyone that isn’t Jewish. I rejected this wholeheartedly and spent several years in Asia and West Africa, perhaps the only Jewish person in the country, at least I never met another. Therefore, it was a strange surprise to me when a couple of years ago I wrote a poem where my Jewishness took front and center. Since then, more poems of otherness, pogroms, Holocaust, survivors, and racism have appeared. My perspective, I believe, is more irreverent and surreal than what one thinks of when they think of Jewish poetry—if they think of Jewish poetry at all.
There’s no one way to be Jewish, just as there’s no one way to be a poet. I tried to investigate contemporary Jewish poetry because there is the lineage of Mark Percy and Adrienne Rich and Stanley Kunitz. I mean, there were a lot of major American poets who were wonderful, and who didn’t shy away from being Jewish. I don’t see that today as much.
For the last few years, I’m writing a lot about my Judaism, which was maybe not that different from your own upbringing, in terms of things not spoken about. My parents weren’t particularly spiritual, but we belonged to a conservative, not a reformed, synagogue. I was the only one of my sisters who dropped out of Hebrew school and who never had a bat mitzvah. Later, in my thirties, I was living in South Africa on a Fulbright Fellowship and somehow acquired a modern Orthodox boyfriend who was American. He was devout. In Cape Town, there is a sizable Hasidic population, and from him I learned really beautiful and weird things about Judaism. I saw my faith and culture through a very different lens, being connected to him for a while.
As evidenced by your poems, your travels yielded life-changing experiences that expanded your worldview.
SR: My eighteen months in South Africa was due to a Fulbright, which is a great way to travel; Niger, West Africa, was Peace Corps. In Bosnia, I was working for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which came directly out of my Peace Corps work. The OSCE was looking for people to work the election. Who’s going to go to a country that’s still sort of at war? Returned Peace Corps Volunteers—they’ll do it.
As a kid, I didn’t travel much; my parents weren’t worldly in that way at all. They grew up poor. I put my intense desire to travel down to my postage stamp collection and a love of Arabian Nights and all things British that I learned about in books by Emily Brontë, Edith Nesbit, Thomas Hardy, and others. Also, I loved maps and postage stamps. They were kid things that didn’t cost a lot of money that I became obsessed with.
When I applied to the Peace Corps, I wanted to go somewhere I couldn’t imagine getting to otherwise—for example, Niger, which does not have a large tourist industry. My first book, The Cartographer’s Tongue, contains poems from my time in Africa, however, for seven years after I left the Peace Corps, I didn’t write a word. I wasn’t sure that I could ever be a poet—I’d had teachers, old white men, who told me that I should give it up—not that I’d asked for their opinions.
Even though I knew so little about Niger, I knew more than most Americans, and I made a deal with myself: I would only write about people I knew or that I saw every day. It’s a bigger question now, but it was a question for me even then: as an outsider, was I exploiting people? Was I clear that I was a visitor to Niger, even if my visit was two years? Was I implicating yourself? Who was I? What was my position? A lot of bad poetry is born from someone looking at someone else who has less than they have. I didn’t want to write those poems. I wanted to write poems that connected me with the people in my community. El Hadji the tailor, David the soccer coach, Howa the guardian’s wife. Once I got back to Boston , got a stable job, and had some time to think and be by myself—actually, my writing started when I got my first apartment. That’s funny. I’ve never thought of that before. Roommates were not conducive to poetry.
I need a lot of time, too, particularly time alone, to metabolize an experience into writing. Other outlets help, like painting and playing music.
SR: I’m a terrible painter—no one will ever see them—but I love it. When I came back from Peace Corps, I finished grad school and I got my first professional job at Amnesty International. The job gave me a lot of space: instead of working three part-time jobs as I’d been doing, I got one “real” career. Even though it was demanding, I don’t remember bringing much work home with me at all. When I left work, it was done, so I took a beginning watercolor class at Cambridge Adult Education Center. I thought I was going in with people [like me] who take classes and just want to learn some techniques. I was by far the worst watercolorist in the class. However, I had to embrace my rudimentary abilities and laugh and realize I was still really enjoying it. We painted grapefruits; we painted dead fish—I would bring them home.
So, I get home from the class and I keep on painting my not-so-good paintings; I think that opened up something for me. I realized I needed a creative outlet—or two or three. It doesn’t matter what somebody else says. It just matters that I’m enjoying the experience of making and, you know, that’s a hard place to stay because we still want improvement and we have egos. Shortly after that class, a good friend who’s now a published poet, Jennifer Markell, said, “Hey, I heard about this class. It’s around a woman’s dining room table on Thursday nights.” The idea that you could go to a class that wasn’t part of a university program was kind of new—the ’70s and the ’80s were really different. I had written poetry all through childhood, and I’d had terrible experiences in college with professors who shut me down. I remember thinking as I graduated college, I’m twenty-three years old—what do I have to say? After three years in the United Kingdom, two years in the Peace Corps, and a lot of traveling, I finally felt like I had something to say.
Did you draw on notes from your travels, or was it a mix of memory and research?
SR: I have a memory that normally works pretty well. I don’t think I kept a very good journal in Niger. Maybe I did better in Bosnia because I wasn’t in Bosnia for a long period of time. I worked in Bosnia and Croatia for six weeks, so that was an easier time to take notes. I rely more on personal relationships and moments of communication. Like all of us, [I] have a selective memory, but the things my memory selects, it keeps in clear, bright Kodachrome, and I can access it.
When we’re traveling, everything is new. We’re laying down memories in different ways. It’s like love—or breakups—which leads me to your glorious breakup poems which present a rich and irreverent mix of yearning, lust, and disappointment. Your poems made me laugh and exclaim, “How does she do that?!”
SR: Thank you. That’s such a nice thing to hear. I don’t think anyone has ever pointed to that before. I suppose I’m trying to say something interesting…and that’s always deadly, right? To try to start there? But it’s a way to process relationships, to feel like, I need to get this out of my skin, out of my blood system. Which poems made you laugh out loud?
The first that springs to mind is “You Might Be Wondering Why I Called You Here Today.” Lines like Dear ex-lovers help / yourself to snacks. I’ve laid out nuts / with a thought towards metaphor. Stinky cheese / for example. And Hello Pablo, Ricardo, Saul— / please taste the oysters of angst, the grapes / grown of low self-esteem... I feel that!
SR: That was fun to write. I realize if I’m having fun creating a poem, then perhaps a reader will also enjoy herself. A lot of the times, I’m writing with friends in order to get a draft out. The way I deal with writer’s block is to surround myself with poet friends, and people who will do this weird thing with me. My friend, Kelli Russell Agodon, and I can go for hours. We do prompts for each other of ten or twenty minutes. I believe I wrote “You’re Probably Wondering Why I Called You Here” with Kelli.
We have this thing where we give each other prompts, and at least half the time we ignore the prompts. There’s something about being in middle age that I find very freeing. Naomi Shihab Nye says that when you’re young, everything is about emotion and feeling—but as you get a little older, it’s all about energy. Writing poetry is often about harnessing that alchemical energy.
I was also drawn to an image in the final lines of “The Women of Kismayo”: watched by their wives’ cool breasts / round, full, commanding as colonels—two taut nipples targeting each man. It’s like, yeah, buddy, my guns are pointed at you.
SR: [Laughs] I remember exactly where I was when I wrote to two nipples targeting each man, and I remember thinking, where did that come from?! Oh, my God—I can’t say that! There was my ending. I was at a writing retreat at the time. COVID has stopped a lot of us from moving in the way we had been moving, but I used to go to a writing retreat on San Juan Island every December. As soon as I was done teaching, I would pack up my car and drive.
This leads to a larger question of travel or movement: how have your poems evolved over time with regard to distance and intimacy?
SR: My first book, The Cartographer’s Tongue, was poems of being a Peace Corps volunteer, and doing electoral work in Bosnia, and human rights work in Palestine. The writing was very much concerned with looking out, and trying to honor international experiences and people. But I’ve now lived in Seattle for twenty-two years, so my international experiences are no longer my focus, yet I’m still writing poems. Sometimes I’m writing about things that people often write about as young writers. Earlier in life, I wasn’t interested in my own childhood—it was too close—but now it’s getting further and further away so it becomes more interesting.
Intimacy…I’m not sure what to do with that word. The first poem I published was in correspondence with a Sharon Olds poem called “Lovers with Love.” It’s been there all along, but maybe what’s changed is the amount of poems that are more personal. It was less then, and more now. It’s hard to say because I still engage with the world. I love poems about strange happenings. I love reading wonderful, weird stories. I have a poem [about] a ninety-nine-year-old woman waking up and finding a kinkajou on her bed, which is an exotic animal from Brazil. She’s in Florida, and she wakes up with this animal—it just climbs in her window.
I don’t see the changes in my own work. Who is clear on their own evolution? Except I used to live on other continents. I preferred other worlds. Maybe it was a way to hide the self. I didn’t feel that my personal experiences were valid. Thank goodness that has changed.
That leads us to “Someday I Will Love Susan Rich.” It brings tears to my eyes. Many of us struggle with loving ourselves.
SR: That was inspired by three poems: “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” which came from “Someday I Will Love Roger Reeves,” which is after Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Katy.” O’Hara wrote the initiating poem.1 I was really struck by the fact that all of the poems were by men.
It felt very risqué to write a poem with that title; I don’t think I thought that title would stay. I’m sure it was a writing date with Kelli Agodon that got that poem started. Sometimes when [I’m] with a friend poet, I get braver, like, why not? It’s not like you have to publish it. It’s not like anyone’s ever going to see it. It can rest in the notebook by itself. There was something counterintuitive about writing “Someday I’ll Love Susan Rich” compared to the way I am. I think of myself as someone who doesn’t like the spotlight, who is very begrudgingly on social media. To write a poem and claim that voice felt like an outrageous act. That’s the thing: aren’t we all braver on the page? Isn’t it easier to be courageous when it is you and the pen and the paper?
My fantasy is make work that means something to people without having to promote it, but the writing has to get out there for people to discover it.
SR: I know. I will feel thrilled for days and days to hear that my poems meant something to you; that you laughed out loud and came close to tears. Those things are so energizing to hear—and we don’t know those things unless someone tells us. A poet friend in South Africa once said to me that it’s an equation: there’s the writer on one side, then there is the poem, then there’s the reader. You need all three parts for the art to be whole or finished.
Wise words. Are these the kinds of conversations you have with your students?
SR: I try. I do. I think the idea of writing for someone beyond oneself—that takes time.
Before we go, let’s talk about Poets on the Coast, which you co-founded with Kelli Russell Agodon. This is a generative writing retreat for women poets, now in its twelfth year. Why is a creative space like this still necessary?
Women who come year after year tell me it’s important. It’s a two-way street. The fact that Poets on the Coast has grown tremendously since we started lets me know that a safe space for women to write and be heard and seen and accepted and welcomed is still a rare thing. I wish the world were different. Kelli and I started the retreat as a response to conferences where we’d been invited to teach. We had several experiences between us that were not nurturing. I remember being asked to teach in an unheated stairwell. There are probably other stories that I’ve managed to block out. The point being that we knew there was a better way to create community among women poets.
Kelli and I were sitting at a residency up in the San Juan [Island]s having a glass of wine on a very stormy night—one of those bravado conversations: If I ran a writing conference, I would make sure everybody got a gift! I would make sure everybody got a one-on-one experience! We were just dreaming. Kelli googled it and said, “Nobody has Poets on the Coast. We can do this.”
Since that time so many women who’ve joined us have gone on to publish books, and have started their own writing circles with people they met at Poets on the Coast, which thrills me to no end. Each year, we do a different theme. Rediscovering Joy was this past year. One year it was about literary citizenship, and ways [of being] in the world of poetry besides writing a poem or getting a poem published. I think Poets on the Coast has become an entity where people can feel safe and meet like-minded women and leave with a stack of new poems started and new ideas about poetry.
What do you find in common between the needs of the writers who come to Poets on the Coast and those closer to the beginning of their poetry journey at Highline College where you teach?
SR: In many ways, it’s not that different. My poet friends and I tend to have a lot of self-doubt. Is this good enough? I can’t be a poet because I didn’t write a perfectly composed poem in the ten-minute warm-up you gave me, so I guess I’m no good. There’s a lot of beating one’s chest, no matter what age one is. One thing I try to do, no matter who I’m teaching, is instill joy in the actual making of the thing—and surprising oneself, claiming your space, claiming who it is you are.
I have one assignment with my Highline students where I give a list of thirty or forty poets with links to their work. Each of my students finds a poet they will claim as their mentor, and everybody has to choose someone different. They have [a] sense of ownership: this is my poet. I try to have a wildly diverse group of poets, and the only thing in common is that everybody’s alive. Often, not always, poets gravitate towards poets of their ethnic background—how much that is needed, especially at a young age.
Part of my teaching is being open to all sorts of different poetry, not This is the way it is. I push revision—on myself, on students of all ages. With the younger poets, there’s more resistance. Through my watercolors, I’ve started to understand it. I often feel like I did something I really liked, but I don’t know how to do it again, and if I keep painting, I’m going to ruin it, so I have to stop—now. They don’t voice those things, but I think that’s part of it. I giv[e] them ideas for revision, but it may be more than they feel ready to do. I see it as a continuum.
I love having students who’ve never written a poem before. I’m always looking for students who find a way to have a conversation with themselves, that understand they have a voice, they can be seen, they can be heard, that they should be writing poems rather than letting other people write poems about them. It’s a powerful thing.
There’s a different dialogue possible now with poets and writers, particularly for young students. Programs like Writers in the Schools bring local writers to classrooms today; most everyone I read in school was dead. There was no way to ask questions. Now, you can follow your favorite poets on Twitter.
SR: I get concerned about dead poets like Denise Levertov, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kuntiz. I’m afraid those poets start to fall away to the detriment of young poets. As soon as somebody dies it’s, Okay, they’re gone.
True. There’s your continuum again: present, recent, past, long past, ancestors. We need them all.
SR: Yes. Twenty-first century poetry—we’re in a new time—it’s hard to see where it will go.
Speaking of past and present coming together, leave us with a few thoughts on how you crafted the manuscript for Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems.
SR: It is new and selected, which feels like a wild thing to be of an age where I‘ve produced enough work to actually have a new and selected—and to be lucky enough to have Salmon Poetry want to publish it. At first it seems like an easy job: you pull out your books, pull out your favorite poems, and you’re done. It really isn’t. I had a wonderful back-and-forth with Mark Doty. As you know, he did a new and selected, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, that won the National Book Award. He was generous enough to write me a funny almost-essay about what it was like to do that.
With all the people doing workshops on manuscripts and how you put a book together and get it published, there’s actually nothing I could find on how to create a new and selected. It used to be that you had to be Shakespeare to get a new and selected. Clearly, that’s no longer the case. It was an interesting experience because I reread all of my work, including work that didn’t make it into the book. Mark said, “You’re going to forget pieces, and you’re going to leave out pieces that you really wished you’d had in.” Right now, I’m wondering which poems those are! I haven’t quite figured it out.
Mark mentioned that when he was first putting together Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, he wrote to a group of trusted friends and asked, “Which ones? What do you think?” Ultimately, their answers were of little use to him. The answers Mark’s friends gave were about their personal experiences with the work. That’s the type of thing I would have done—reached out to people—but because he told me this I thought, I guess I’ll try to do this on my own.
My hope is that readers will identify reasons why the new poems hang together: my obsession with women surrealists, for example, or my love of still lifes and self-portraits. In the end, my personal experience filters these things and find[s] order and meaning. Have I put in the [poems] I want? What story do they tell? That’s what was on my mind.
1. Editor’s note: the poet Roger Reeves wrote the poem “Someday I'll Love Roger Reeves” in response to Frank O'Hara's poem, “Katy,” which includes the lines, "I am never quiet, I mean silent. / Some day I’ll love Frank O’Hara.” Ocean Vuong’s poem, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” echoes and builds upon these predecessors.
Themes of time and change are threaded throughout our conversation, which is to be expected when talking about poems that span the globe and a lifetime of experiences. We touched on chutzpah and writing in community, and what is lost when memory fades. In noting what can’t be found even through online searches, we’re reminded that the digital world hasn’t always existed—it can’t be relied upon to corroborate the past—though many of us spend a good portion of our lives in the cloud today. Rich’s journeys through memory and time encourage us to keep a notebook and pen handy for recording what we might wish to revisit: an overheard conversation, a coastal road trip with a lover, or the next overseas adventure which, these days, is long awaited. ~GDF
This transcript has been edited for clarity and flow.
Gabriela Denise Frank: Before we enter your new book, Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems, let’s begin with an elemental question: how do poems work their way out of your skin into the world?
Susan Rich: Sometimes I begin with an image or a memory. Right now, I’m obsessed with the memory of a particular pickle barrel. These existed in my early childhood in kosher grocery stores. I have a memory of being very small, and being faced with one twice my size. When I asked my older sister, Ruby, she had no memory of it. I couldn’t believe she didn’t remember. It was this amazing thing! In my imagination, I still see the rough wood.
Often, the story behind something is what I find interesting. I’m working on a poem about Leonor Fini, a surrealist in Paris, who was famous for living with two lovers, being out as a bisexual in the ’30s and ’40s—and for having twenty-three cats. One of her paintings, “The Blind Ones,” was considered so erotic that, when she had a showing of her work, the curator required it be kept in a separate room behind a curtain. Gallerygoers needed special permission and had to be a certain age to view it.
What about the image of the pickle barrel calls to you?
SR: [Laughs] Well, I needed to finish the poem to find out, right? I’m not much of a fan of pickles, but it delights me to talk to you about pickle barrels. Really. Here’s something that has completely disappeared from grocery stores that used to be in the back by the refrigerator cases. It’s about the barrel and the ritual. Everything else in the grocery store is in a cardboard box or a plastic bag. Already packaged. But pickles were a whole different deal. My father had to get someone who worked in the store to pick it out for him. Morses’ was a pretty down-and-out grocery store, even when I was a kid. Now it’s no longer there. I’ve googled to my heart’s content, but it disappeared before the internet, and now [it lives only in] memory—another interesting idea.
When those of us who remember a place are gone, it really becomes a ghost.
SR: A couple of weeks ago, I told the poet Jan Freeman that I used to live in Western Massachusetts. I managed a used and new bookstore on North Pleasant Street in Amherst, Massachusetts. When Jan asked me which one, I went blank. I had worked there for a little over a year. I remembered that I didn’t like the name—I thought it was too cute—and we both tried to come up with names that were too cute. I started googling, but there was nothing. I tried so hard, but I couldn’t find the owner of the shop. Then I tried my CV, which starts in 1984; I worked at the bookstore in ’83. It was like, how did this place completely disappear? It was a brick-and-mortar bookstore for almost five years. Over the course of the day when I wasn’t thinking about it, The Reading Remedy came to me. It shows how we rely on the internet to be our memory. And how wild it is when it doesn’t work.
With time, even solid things become ephemeral; they turn into gaps or silences. Can you talk about how silence works in your poems?
SR: Silence is very familiar to me. Although I had older sisters growing up, they left for college when I was nine and never came back again except for brief visits. In many ways I grew up as an only child. My mom worked. I spent a lot of time alone, a great deal of time reading. The main Brookline Public Library was my favorite place. I spent a lot of time there. Silence feels very comfortable to me, very peaceful.
One poem that deals with silences or alternative types of communication is “Ghazal for the Woman from Vitez.” This is an early poem about my first time in Bosnia and Herzegovina working for the Office of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Vitez is a town in Central Bosnia . I was walking there with three other OSCE workers who were also going to be supervising the first-ever Bosnian elections. Suddenly, this woman came out of her house and just kind of scurried us into her yard in a way that would never happen in this country. She pulled us in, talking a mile a minute in Bosnian. Then her husband comes out and they’re both bringing food, and they’re showing us the garden, and it’s all being done in gestures and goodwill. I am sure they knew we were foreign, and perhaps that we were there to support the elections. We would have been seen as a kind of peacekeeping organization. Never mind that none of us had ever worked an international election before. I don’t know that this experience was silent exactly, there was far too much laughter.
I do find that silence is underrated. I have friends who can’t be alone, or they always have music or the television on. I can’t imagine poetry without silence. I can’t imagine being able to write. Some people have music they listen to, and I do that once in a while because it does change the work, but mostly I want silence. Silence…and a cat.
In “Detection” you write This was the understory of our lives— / creation and caution. We were archeologists / of the unspoken. The unspoken is a different kind of silence. Here, it relates to Judaism.
I was writing with my friend, the poet Elizabeth Austen, and some prompt started a poem called “Pregnant with the Dead.” The prompt had nothing to do with religion or pregnancy, but that poem [was] a portal for me. It was the beginning of thinking, okay, Judaism is something that’s part of me, even though I can’t claim to be an actively practicing Jew. For many years, I avoided writing about Judaism and my family, not because it seemed too difficult, but because it seemed too boring.
I grew up at the far edge of the post-Holocaust generation with relatives who had hidden in garbage cans to survive and [who] had escaped rape by being bandaged to pass as lepers. The old country stories always ended with the same piece of implied advice: don’t trust anyone that isn’t Jewish. I rejected this wholeheartedly and spent several years in Asia and West Africa, perhaps the only Jewish person in the country, at least I never met another. Therefore, it was a strange surprise to me when a couple of years ago I wrote a poem where my Jewishness took front and center. Since then, more poems of otherness, pogroms, Holocaust, survivors, and racism have appeared. My perspective, I believe, is more irreverent and surreal than what one thinks of when they think of Jewish poetry—if they think of Jewish poetry at all.
There’s no one way to be Jewish, just as there’s no one way to be a poet. I tried to investigate contemporary Jewish poetry because there is the lineage of Mark Percy and Adrienne Rich and Stanley Kunitz. I mean, there were a lot of major American poets who were wonderful, and who didn’t shy away from being Jewish. I don’t see that today as much.
For the last few years, I’m writing a lot about my Judaism, which was maybe not that different from your own upbringing, in terms of things not spoken about. My parents weren’t particularly spiritual, but we belonged to a conservative, not a reformed, synagogue. I was the only one of my sisters who dropped out of Hebrew school and who never had a bat mitzvah. Later, in my thirties, I was living in South Africa on a Fulbright Fellowship and somehow acquired a modern Orthodox boyfriend who was American. He was devout. In Cape Town, there is a sizable Hasidic population, and from him I learned really beautiful and weird things about Judaism. I saw my faith and culture through a very different lens, being connected to him for a while.
As evidenced by your poems, your travels yielded life-changing experiences that expanded your worldview.
SR: My eighteen months in South Africa was due to a Fulbright, which is a great way to travel; Niger, West Africa, was Peace Corps. In Bosnia, I was working for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which came directly out of my Peace Corps work. The OSCE was looking for people to work the election. Who’s going to go to a country that’s still sort of at war? Returned Peace Corps Volunteers—they’ll do it.
As a kid, I didn’t travel much; my parents weren’t worldly in that way at all. They grew up poor. I put my intense desire to travel down to my postage stamp collection and a love of Arabian Nights and all things British that I learned about in books by Emily Brontë, Edith Nesbit, Thomas Hardy, and others. Also, I loved maps and postage stamps. They were kid things that didn’t cost a lot of money that I became obsessed with.
When I applied to the Peace Corps, I wanted to go somewhere I couldn’t imagine getting to otherwise—for example, Niger, which does not have a large tourist industry. My first book, The Cartographer’s Tongue, contains poems from my time in Africa, however, for seven years after I left the Peace Corps, I didn’t write a word. I wasn’t sure that I could ever be a poet—I’d had teachers, old white men, who told me that I should give it up—not that I’d asked for their opinions.
Even though I knew so little about Niger, I knew more than most Americans, and I made a deal with myself: I would only write about people I knew or that I saw every day. It’s a bigger question now, but it was a question for me even then: as an outsider, was I exploiting people? Was I clear that I was a visitor to Niger, even if my visit was two years? Was I implicating yourself? Who was I? What was my position? A lot of bad poetry is born from someone looking at someone else who has less than they have. I didn’t want to write those poems. I wanted to write poems that connected me with the people in my community. El Hadji the tailor, David the soccer coach, Howa the guardian’s wife. Once I got back to Boston , got a stable job, and had some time to think and be by myself—actually, my writing started when I got my first apartment. That’s funny. I’ve never thought of that before. Roommates were not conducive to poetry.
I need a lot of time, too, particularly time alone, to metabolize an experience into writing. Other outlets help, like painting and playing music.
SR: I’m a terrible painter—no one will ever see them—but I love it. When I came back from Peace Corps, I finished grad school and I got my first professional job at Amnesty International. The job gave me a lot of space: instead of working three part-time jobs as I’d been doing, I got one “real” career. Even though it was demanding, I don’t remember bringing much work home with me at all. When I left work, it was done, so I took a beginning watercolor class at Cambridge Adult Education Center. I thought I was going in with people [like me] who take classes and just want to learn some techniques. I was by far the worst watercolorist in the class. However, I had to embrace my rudimentary abilities and laugh and realize I was still really enjoying it. We painted grapefruits; we painted dead fish—I would bring them home.
So, I get home from the class and I keep on painting my not-so-good paintings; I think that opened up something for me. I realized I needed a creative outlet—or two or three. It doesn’t matter what somebody else says. It just matters that I’m enjoying the experience of making and, you know, that’s a hard place to stay because we still want improvement and we have egos. Shortly after that class, a good friend who’s now a published poet, Jennifer Markell, said, “Hey, I heard about this class. It’s around a woman’s dining room table on Thursday nights.” The idea that you could go to a class that wasn’t part of a university program was kind of new—the ’70s and the ’80s were really different. I had written poetry all through childhood, and I’d had terrible experiences in college with professors who shut me down. I remember thinking as I graduated college, I’m twenty-three years old—what do I have to say? After three years in the United Kingdom, two years in the Peace Corps, and a lot of traveling, I finally felt like I had something to say.
Did you draw on notes from your travels, or was it a mix of memory and research?
SR: I have a memory that normally works pretty well. I don’t think I kept a very good journal in Niger. Maybe I did better in Bosnia because I wasn’t in Bosnia for a long period of time. I worked in Bosnia and Croatia for six weeks, so that was an easier time to take notes. I rely more on personal relationships and moments of communication. Like all of us, [I] have a selective memory, but the things my memory selects, it keeps in clear, bright Kodachrome, and I can access it.
When we’re traveling, everything is new. We’re laying down memories in different ways. It’s like love—or breakups—which leads me to your glorious breakup poems which present a rich and irreverent mix of yearning, lust, and disappointment. Your poems made me laugh and exclaim, “How does she do that?!”
SR: Thank you. That’s such a nice thing to hear. I don’t think anyone has ever pointed to that before. I suppose I’m trying to say something interesting…and that’s always deadly, right? To try to start there? But it’s a way to process relationships, to feel like, I need to get this out of my skin, out of my blood system. Which poems made you laugh out loud?
The first that springs to mind is “You Might Be Wondering Why I Called You Here Today.” Lines like Dear ex-lovers help / yourself to snacks. I’ve laid out nuts / with a thought towards metaphor. Stinky cheese / for example. And Hello Pablo, Ricardo, Saul— / please taste the oysters of angst, the grapes / grown of low self-esteem... I feel that!
SR: That was fun to write. I realize if I’m having fun creating a poem, then perhaps a reader will also enjoy herself. A lot of the times, I’m writing with friends in order to get a draft out. The way I deal with writer’s block is to surround myself with poet friends, and people who will do this weird thing with me. My friend, Kelli Russell Agodon, and I can go for hours. We do prompts for each other of ten or twenty minutes. I believe I wrote “You’re Probably Wondering Why I Called You Here” with Kelli.
We have this thing where we give each other prompts, and at least half the time we ignore the prompts. There’s something about being in middle age that I find very freeing. Naomi Shihab Nye says that when you’re young, everything is about emotion and feeling—but as you get a little older, it’s all about energy. Writing poetry is often about harnessing that alchemical energy.
I was also drawn to an image in the final lines of “The Women of Kismayo”: watched by their wives’ cool breasts / round, full, commanding as colonels—two taut nipples targeting each man. It’s like, yeah, buddy, my guns are pointed at you.
SR: [Laughs] I remember exactly where I was when I wrote to two nipples targeting each man, and I remember thinking, where did that come from?! Oh, my God—I can’t say that! There was my ending. I was at a writing retreat at the time. COVID has stopped a lot of us from moving in the way we had been moving, but I used to go to a writing retreat on San Juan Island every December. As soon as I was done teaching, I would pack up my car and drive.
This leads to a larger question of travel or movement: how have your poems evolved over time with regard to distance and intimacy?
SR: My first book, The Cartographer’s Tongue, was poems of being a Peace Corps volunteer, and doing electoral work in Bosnia, and human rights work in Palestine. The writing was very much concerned with looking out, and trying to honor international experiences and people. But I’ve now lived in Seattle for twenty-two years, so my international experiences are no longer my focus, yet I’m still writing poems. Sometimes I’m writing about things that people often write about as young writers. Earlier in life, I wasn’t interested in my own childhood—it was too close—but now it’s getting further and further away so it becomes more interesting.
Intimacy…I’m not sure what to do with that word. The first poem I published was in correspondence with a Sharon Olds poem called “Lovers with Love.” It’s been there all along, but maybe what’s changed is the amount of poems that are more personal. It was less then, and more now. It’s hard to say because I still engage with the world. I love poems about strange happenings. I love reading wonderful, weird stories. I have a poem [about] a ninety-nine-year-old woman waking up and finding a kinkajou on her bed, which is an exotic animal from Brazil. She’s in Florida, and she wakes up with this animal—it just climbs in her window.
I don’t see the changes in my own work. Who is clear on their own evolution? Except I used to live on other continents. I preferred other worlds. Maybe it was a way to hide the self. I didn’t feel that my personal experiences were valid. Thank goodness that has changed.
That leads us to “Someday I Will Love Susan Rich.” It brings tears to my eyes. Many of us struggle with loving ourselves.
SR: That was inspired by three poems: “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” which came from “Someday I Will Love Roger Reeves,” which is after Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Katy.” O’Hara wrote the initiating poem.1 I was really struck by the fact that all of the poems were by men.
It felt very risqué to write a poem with that title; I don’t think I thought that title would stay. I’m sure it was a writing date with Kelli Agodon that got that poem started. Sometimes when [I’m] with a friend poet, I get braver, like, why not? It’s not like you have to publish it. It’s not like anyone’s ever going to see it. It can rest in the notebook by itself. There was something counterintuitive about writing “Someday I’ll Love Susan Rich” compared to the way I am. I think of myself as someone who doesn’t like the spotlight, who is very begrudgingly on social media. To write a poem and claim that voice felt like an outrageous act. That’s the thing: aren’t we all braver on the page? Isn’t it easier to be courageous when it is you and the pen and the paper?
My fantasy is make work that means something to people without having to promote it, but the writing has to get out there for people to discover it.
SR: I know. I will feel thrilled for days and days to hear that my poems meant something to you; that you laughed out loud and came close to tears. Those things are so energizing to hear—and we don’t know those things unless someone tells us. A poet friend in South Africa once said to me that it’s an equation: there’s the writer on one side, then there is the poem, then there’s the reader. You need all three parts for the art to be whole or finished.
Wise words. Are these the kinds of conversations you have with your students?
SR: I try. I do. I think the idea of writing for someone beyond oneself—that takes time.
Before we go, let’s talk about Poets on the Coast, which you co-founded with Kelli Russell Agodon. This is a generative writing retreat for women poets, now in its twelfth year. Why is a creative space like this still necessary?
Women who come year after year tell me it’s important. It’s a two-way street. The fact that Poets on the Coast has grown tremendously since we started lets me know that a safe space for women to write and be heard and seen and accepted and welcomed is still a rare thing. I wish the world were different. Kelli and I started the retreat as a response to conferences where we’d been invited to teach. We had several experiences between us that were not nurturing. I remember being asked to teach in an unheated stairwell. There are probably other stories that I’ve managed to block out. The point being that we knew there was a better way to create community among women poets.
Kelli and I were sitting at a residency up in the San Juan [Island]s having a glass of wine on a very stormy night—one of those bravado conversations: If I ran a writing conference, I would make sure everybody got a gift! I would make sure everybody got a one-on-one experience! We were just dreaming. Kelli googled it and said, “Nobody has Poets on the Coast. We can do this.”
Since that time so many women who’ve joined us have gone on to publish books, and have started their own writing circles with people they met at Poets on the Coast, which thrills me to no end. Each year, we do a different theme. Rediscovering Joy was this past year. One year it was about literary citizenship, and ways [of being] in the world of poetry besides writing a poem or getting a poem published. I think Poets on the Coast has become an entity where people can feel safe and meet like-minded women and leave with a stack of new poems started and new ideas about poetry.
What do you find in common between the needs of the writers who come to Poets on the Coast and those closer to the beginning of their poetry journey at Highline College where you teach?
SR: In many ways, it’s not that different. My poet friends and I tend to have a lot of self-doubt. Is this good enough? I can’t be a poet because I didn’t write a perfectly composed poem in the ten-minute warm-up you gave me, so I guess I’m no good. There’s a lot of beating one’s chest, no matter what age one is. One thing I try to do, no matter who I’m teaching, is instill joy in the actual making of the thing—and surprising oneself, claiming your space, claiming who it is you are.
I have one assignment with my Highline students where I give a list of thirty or forty poets with links to their work. Each of my students finds a poet they will claim as their mentor, and everybody has to choose someone different. They have [a] sense of ownership: this is my poet. I try to have a wildly diverse group of poets, and the only thing in common is that everybody’s alive. Often, not always, poets gravitate towards poets of their ethnic background—how much that is needed, especially at a young age.
Part of my teaching is being open to all sorts of different poetry, not This is the way it is. I push revision—on myself, on students of all ages. With the younger poets, there’s more resistance. Through my watercolors, I’ve started to understand it. I often feel like I did something I really liked, but I don’t know how to do it again, and if I keep painting, I’m going to ruin it, so I have to stop—now. They don’t voice those things, but I think that’s part of it. I giv[e] them ideas for revision, but it may be more than they feel ready to do. I see it as a continuum.
I love having students who’ve never written a poem before. I’m always looking for students who find a way to have a conversation with themselves, that understand they have a voice, they can be seen, they can be heard, that they should be writing poems rather than letting other people write poems about them. It’s a powerful thing.
There’s a different dialogue possible now with poets and writers, particularly for young students. Programs like Writers in the Schools bring local writers to classrooms today; most everyone I read in school was dead. There was no way to ask questions. Now, you can follow your favorite poets on Twitter.
SR: I get concerned about dead poets like Denise Levertov, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kuntiz. I’m afraid those poets start to fall away to the detriment of young poets. As soon as somebody dies it’s, Okay, they’re gone.
True. There’s your continuum again: present, recent, past, long past, ancestors. We need them all.
SR: Yes. Twenty-first century poetry—we’re in a new time—it’s hard to see where it will go.
Speaking of past and present coming together, leave us with a few thoughts on how you crafted the manuscript for Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems.
SR: It is new and selected, which feels like a wild thing to be of an age where I‘ve produced enough work to actually have a new and selected—and to be lucky enough to have Salmon Poetry want to publish it. At first it seems like an easy job: you pull out your books, pull out your favorite poems, and you’re done. It really isn’t. I had a wonderful back-and-forth with Mark Doty. As you know, he did a new and selected, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, that won the National Book Award. He was generous enough to write me a funny almost-essay about what it was like to do that.
With all the people doing workshops on manuscripts and how you put a book together and get it published, there’s actually nothing I could find on how to create a new and selected. It used to be that you had to be Shakespeare to get a new and selected. Clearly, that’s no longer the case. It was an interesting experience because I reread all of my work, including work that didn’t make it into the book. Mark said, “You’re going to forget pieces, and you’re going to leave out pieces that you really wished you’d had in.” Right now, I’m wondering which poems those are! I haven’t quite figured it out.
Mark mentioned that when he was first putting together Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, he wrote to a group of trusted friends and asked, “Which ones? What do you think?” Ultimately, their answers were of little use to him. The answers Mark’s friends gave were about their personal experiences with the work. That’s the type of thing I would have done—reached out to people—but because he told me this I thought, I guess I’ll try to do this on my own.
My hope is that readers will identify reasons why the new poems hang together: my obsession with women surrealists, for example, or my love of still lifes and self-portraits. In the end, my personal experience filters these things and find[s] order and meaning. Have I put in the [poems] I want? What story do they tell? That’s what was on my mind.
1. Editor’s note: the poet Roger Reeves wrote the poem “Someday I'll Love Roger Reeves” in response to Frank O'Hara's poem, “Katy,” which includes the lines, "I am never quiet, I mean silent. / Some day I’ll love Frank O’Hara.” Ocean Vuong’s poem, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” echoes and builds upon these predecessors.
Susan Rich is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, Gallery of Postcards and Maps, published by Salmon Poetry. Her poetry has garnered awards from 4Culture, Artists Trust, PEN USA, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Times Literary Supplement Prize. Rich’s poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, O Magazine, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the director of Poets on the Coast: Writing Retreat for Women; visit her at http://poetsusanrich.com
Gabriela Denise Frank is a Pacific Northwest writer, editor, and creative writing instructor. The author of Pity She Didn’t Stay ’Til the End (Bottlecap Press), her work is supported by 4Culture, Artist Trust, Centrum, the Civita Institute, Jack Straw, Mineral School, Vermont Studio Center, and Willapa Bay AIR. Her writing has appeared in True Story, Tahoma Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, Pembroke, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her essay “BAD DATE” was named a Notable Essay of 2020 by Best American Essays. She serves as the creative nonfiction editor of Crab Creek Review. www.gabrieladenisefrank.com