Line / Break | Season 4 with Maurice Manning

Interview Transcript

Ryo Yamaguchi (00:05):
Hey, everybody. I’m Ryo Yamaguchi, the publicist at Copper Canyon Press, and you are tuning in to season four of our interview series. Line Break, which goes off the page and into the poems and minds of our beloved poets. We’ve had so much fun over these seasons, hearing poems, talking about writing, books, life. It’s been one of the favorite things we do at the Press. So friends for season four, a format change. For this season, we are doing some close reads. Each episode will focus on either a single poem or single topic, wandering away and returning and wandering away again along all the little paths we simply can’t resist. The episodes will probably be a little tighter, a little shorter, but we can’t say for sure. Thanks for joining us.

(00:55):
So there are certain kinds of poems for me that really exist in and never really seem to leave wonder. These are poems that begin in vulnerability, which is really receptiveness, and they don’t quite know in which direction they’re headed. Many take place in nature. Often they affirm, but not always. Poems can also be in wonder of the dark, of what hurts, of the ways we are cruel. Many poems in Maurice Manning’s, Snakedoctor live in wonder, and I love reading them so much. They relax me at the same time as they energize, coddle, as they open up.

(01:36):
What’s most interesting though is how they articulate. Wonder sometimes is speechless. It simply cannot be described. But in a Maurice Manning poem, it is description itself that is form of wonder. No poem captures this better than his poem, Translation. So excited to talk about it today with this great steward of wonder Maurice Manning. Maurice, thank you so much for being here.

Maurice Manning (02:01):
Well, thank you for inviting me to be part of this Ryo. It’s a great privilege.

Ryo Yamaguchi (02:08):
No, I’ve been really excited to talk about this. I love the book so much. I should do my job here and show it off here. Snakedoctor, I think it came out really beautifully, marvelously. It’s been really fun to, I don’t know, live with the poems, walk around with them and things. One thing, it’s Friday. For folks who don’t know, we’re Friday morning here. I think it’s always a good energy. And actually one way I kind of want to kick this off, and I’ve been spending so much time in these poems, is to ask you about your week and see how your week has been. In particular I’m kind of curious if you might be able to find, as you reflect back on the week, a moment that you were really perplexed or something, a moment of perplexity for you, maybe just this past week. So let’s start with that question.

Maurice Manning (02:49):
Well, as usual, it’s been a busier week than anybody would’ve anticipated. I’ve got a British fiction writer friend named Jeremy Gavron, and for the last couple of years, he and his wife have been in the U.S. One of their daughters has a really unfortunate medical condition that they’ve been going around all over the country seeing specialists. And we began this exchange over the summer, beginning in July of writing haiku to each other every day. And so started out, I sent a haiku to him. My pledge was I would do it every day for 30 days, and we’ll see what happens. Well, after about four days, he started writing back and we’ve now exchanged hundreds of haiku.

(04:28):
To top things off he recently had to endure open heart surgery. And so part of last week he was laid up with that and wasn’t able to respond. But beginning Monday this week, he wrote back, and that’s been really powerful. And sometimes the stanzas we exchange are serious, and sometimes they’re a little sarcastic. He’s tired of this ordeal that he and his daughter have had to endure. And some point this fall, we began, he happens to be Jewish and we happen to have a rooster whose name is Yahweh. And so now we’re flirting with this notion of a rooster God, who is literally and figuratively present in the exchanges we have.

(06:10):
Last night I was coming home, it was dark, and we live in a very isolated area, and usually I can’t see the homes of any of our neighbors because the landscape’s pretty hilly and such. Last night coming home, I saw a house on fire over the hill from us, and it was horrible. Just everything was in flames. And so the volunteer fire people were there, but obviously it was too late to really save the structure. And who knows how to respond to something like that. It’s an awful thing to see, and you start worrying about your neighbors.

(07:26):
And so I wrote one of my haiku stanzas last night after seeing that, and let me see if I can remember what I wrote. A house burned tonight, Yahweh held his tongue and kept to the coop. That may not be exactly how it went, but it’s pretty close. So yeah, there’s a summary of the week.

Ryo Yamaguchi (08:11):
That’s incredible. I’m consolating all of these features but of course, I don’t know, I mean with hope and sensitivity and respect and hope that everyone’s okay with a burning house and knowing that that’s just, I mean, an utter devastation. I also see it kind of symbolically, I mean this visitation just like the appearance of a new rooster God and that kind of thing in the week. And all as accompaniments to this sense of healing of trying or frustration with this ordeal. And I don’t know that there’s a perfect answer to all of those things, but hearing you describe it all, they all seem necessary to each other, I think in a way. I don’t know.

Maurice Manning (08:57):
Well, I think as I’ve anticipated our conversation, I’ve been thinking about along the lines of what you just said, is there an answer for these life challenges and world challenges? And if there is an answer, it’s not an easy one to pin down or articulate, but I think that that’s partly what we have poetry for. A poem isn’t going to solve a problem or create healing, but it can maybe point the way to something like restoration of some kind of order.

Ryo Yamaguchi (10:06):
Yeah, I love that. Of course, I’m thinking of this project of the correspondence of haiku and at Copper Canyon, we’ve been so lucky to have projects like Braided Creek and things like this that have been poetry correspondences. I love the word restoration though. I’ve been talking a lot with young folks over the last week asking them questions about what poetry does for them. And I hear the word transformation a lot in this, and a poem can transform you. But I think restoration is maybe a specific version of that in a way.

(10:37):
And I don’t know, I’m going to sit with that for a little bit. I think it’s a generous word that also allows for indeterminacies and things. But you, talking about this power of poetry and restoration and also, as getting at something that can’t be described, the ineffable. I think this is all a really good introduction. Actually, I’d love to talk about this poem, Translation. And so I wonder, do you think you could read it for us now? Would that sound good? Yeah?

Maurice Manning (11:04):
Certainly. Certainly. Translation. So I came out of my rainy bower covered with white petals dropped from a tree. My people, long ago, whose milky eyes I still can see would’ve said I had a God’s plenty of petals on me, an expression I liked to hear as a boy because I knew it pointed out the obvious only to make it just like that completely something else. But those people are gone away from the world. So I had to say it myself, the God’s plenty of petals that fell when the little rain came down and I happened to be under the tree. I have no idea what plenty is to God, but it riddles my heart to know that someone thought about it once, probably after a day’s work when he was staring at a lantern or sitting on a porch to watch the stars enumerate themselves and struggling to find the words to catch it all. Then finding them.

Ryo Yamaguchi (12:29):
Yeah, it’s such a lovely poem. And there I have so many things I could say, but part of me wants to talk about its formal qualities. I think a lot of your work has a very kind of beautiful, if not an iambic kind of quality to it, it’s something that has echoes of an old style. But actually I think the first thing I would want to get to is in previous seasons of this interview series of Line Break, we used to ask a question like this. And one thing that really strikes me about this poem, and it was one of the first things I noticed about it and it lingers with me, is this idea that it’s kind of an origin story. It’s the origin story of this turn of phrase, but it’s also an origin story of a wonder language and what language can do.

(13:12):
And so I want to ask you, I think it is you in this poem who’s considering God’s plenty and the joy of that phrase and how it can say this thing. And so I’m kind of curious when, if you can go all the way back to when you were a young boy and when you first encountered, if not poetry, the power of language or the power of art at all, when you’ve recognized yourself in it, when you found that it had agency over you, something like that? An origin story for your own interaction with language.

Maurice Manning (13:45):
Okay, great question. When I was growing up, I wasn’t surrounded by literary aesthetics. Books and the highbrow notion of literary art was really not part of my upbringing. But the older neighbors around and my older relatives were great storytellers and just conversationalists. And I can remember my grandmother and great-grandmother saying things like, “He’s had God’s plenty of troubles,” or something like that. So God’s plenty could have negative connotations as well. And as a boy, I remember, of course I wouldn’t have been able to use these terms then. But being really fascinated by these particular uses of language of God’s plenty and thinking, “What is that?

(15:49):
Does God have plenty?” And just being a little bit more than a little bit mesmerized by this phrase that seemed to have a literal use as well as a figurative use. And so it was like, I can now look back and say this kind of language is living metaphor. And nobody used the word metaphor when I was growing up. I didn’t know what the word was or never encountered it. But in the many years since, I’ve really been grateful for just being in earshot, literally of language that is composed of living metaphors. And that was the poetry I grew up with. It wasn’t on the page, it was in the air coming out of a person’s mouth, and I experienced it by hearing it.

Ryo Yamaguchi (17:30):
I love that. And I mean, it’s such a testament to, well, as you’re saying, a living metaphor and that language is alive and it’s alive among people that we’re the stewards of it in many ways. And yeah, it’s funny to think of metaphor as maybe a fancy word for this now. I love that idea. I mean, one thing that I think is so successful about this poem is that it really is about metaphor. I mean, it’s so directly about it. And thinking about form and things. I mean, one, I’ve been trying to think of words that kind of describe, I think your prosody and your style, and some of it’s, maybe it’s discursive or it has a deductive kind of quality following along a path of logic and things. And I think in this case, about writing itself and bringing it in.

(18:26):
Well, one thing, I guess it’s a way of getting to talking about nature and thinking of living in the world and that a community lives and is permeable with the world. Our intern Dia wrote a number of really wonderful questions for this book, many of them kind of about nature and about nature writing. And so, one of them here, if you don’t mind, I’ve asked this one, I really like this a lot, and I’ll just read it verbatim from the way that Dia idea has written it.

(18:55):
Is there a lesson laid somewhere between understanding nature and also understanding the self? Do you get lost somewhere between the two, or do you stick to one side in order to move forward? And I think here Dia means specifically as you’re composing a poem and you’re thinking about nature and yourself. And I think in this case, I might put in the third of community there too, but I don’t want to complicate it too much.

Maurice Manning (19:20):
Okay, another great question. This poem is rooted in fact, I really was walking out of the woods one day a number of years ago, and it had been raining. And I realized that I was covered in white petals from probably a wild plum tree that grows around here. It’s called a Chickasaw plum, and it’s a modest tree. It’s not a grand tree, but it’s just one of my favorite trees. And I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of time spent in the woods. And for me, going into the woods and belonging to my apprehension of nature, it diminishes one sense of self in a very good way. And then it enlargens another sense of self so that the self is part of the whole, not separated from it.

(21:34):
And in some ways, I find myself belonging to nature and coming out of it, to go back to a previous word we’ve used, restored and not restored to myself, but restored to the kinship with all living things and to feel alive in the way that a tree is alive. And then as humans, we have this medium that is the conduit between that absorbing sense of nature and our simultaneous sense of self. And that conduit is language for me. And so I think part of my effort is to have the poem just be that connector between the completely interdependent and whole sense of nature and the inevitable sense of self.

Ryo Yamaguchi (23:51):
Yeah, that’s so marvelously put. I don’t know. I mean, you raised so many topics, but just the structure here that you describe of being in nature and being connected through language or through maybe specifically the poem. And as that ligature, and of course I also think of the poem as what allows that connection too, in a way or something, or engenders it or something. Yeah, it’s really, really beautifully… I don’t know, really beautifully put, I think. Well, maybe this brings us to a good resting point to think through these things. And I don’t know, would you be up for maybe reading the poem one more time and we can hear it in a new light following some of this conversation?

Maurice Manning (24:41):
Would you mind if I read a different poem?

Ryo Yamaguchi (24:43):
Yeah, that would be wonderful. Yeah.

Maurice Manning (24:45):
Just because it’s a poem called Randy Woodred, which is on page 33.

Ryo Yamaguchi (24:54):
Yeah, I know this. Yeah.

Maurice Manning (24:55):
It is relevant to what we’ve just been talking about, so I’ll try a little show and tell. This is-

Ryo Yamaguchi (25:04):
Yeah, it’s great.

Maurice Manning (25:06):
This is a little field guide book called How to Know the Trees, and it’s got entries for different species and illustrations for their leaves and seeds. And then there’s that, Randy Woodred, some unknown student who had that textbook way back. And field guides are really some of my favorite books. I’ve looked at plant guides and tree guides all the time and bird identification guides. And I was just thumbing through that book one day and I saw this scrawl of a former student’s name who had written his own name into a book about tees. And so there’s a Translation aspect to this.

(26:26):
So, Randy Woodred. The elementary hand leans downward and to the right as if the letters are sliding down a hill. But Randy Woodred wrote his name in the margin of a book to be remembered or to remind himself how free he was to see himself in a book called How to Know The Trees. His name appears out of nowhere, maybe he thought knowing the trees was a way of reading them. Leaf pages, branch chapters, books spine, root words published by a seed, the anonymous author, the geography of being alive. Randy Woodred, the nervous student who probably didn’t have a mind for metaphor yet he left his name as if he’d carved it on a tree in a book about trees with a green cover.

Ryo Yamaguchi (27:40):
Yeah, it’s so wonderful. I can think of, I have guessed that you’re thrilled to discovering old books from thrift stores and antiquarian places because of the marginality. I mean, there’s other poems in Snakedoctor that talk about this, and there was another part of this conversation, or maybe not this one we’re recording but I wanted… Because I have this wonderful astronomy guide that was actually given to me as a gift, and the purpose of the gift, the gift of it actually was this love letter that’s in the opening of it. And it’s great. It’s from one person to another. It’s a really complicated love letter, though. It’s very honest.

(28:17):
She’s talking about some of the problems in their relationship and things, but in the frontispiece of this book about the cosmos, and it’s wonderful. It’s such a great contrast. And I hear all of that in Randy Woodred, too. I mean, you’re trying to link that. Can you tell me, well, yeah, tell me more about your choice to read that and it’s relationship to Translation and how it’s about translation?

Maurice Manning (28:42):
Yeah. Well, I think one of the themes, I guess, of Snakedoctor is to reflect on my eclectic reading experiences and the wonderful discovery of you are reading what’s on the page, but then if you’ve got a used book, there’s very often marginalia and all of a sudden you’re reading another reader’s experience of what’s on the page. And that kind of continuity is really exciting to me. And I view it as a kind of metaphor for reading the woods or reading the world that’s not on a page, but treating this experience of being in the woods, especially as being in a book, one that you can read, but then one that reads you in a reciprocal fashion.

(30:45):
And that interplay is largely what this book is about in some ways very clearly pointed out. But in another poems, it’s of course a little more subtle. But that takes me back to the idea of translation. We encounter things in life, whether it’s in the woods or seeing a house burning, and we translate those experiences into some kind of meaning. And poetry is an act of translation in that broad sense.

Ryo Yamaguchi (32:03):
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m feeling this so much, and just in the middle of this very conversation and thinking, I mean, I’ll use the word consolating maybe that this… I have Randy Woodred and the field guide and the astronomy guide and the house that’s on fire and the Rooster God, and all of this is in part of, well, going back to what you said before, I think maybe my main takeaway is this idea of living metaphor of languages being alive. And in the dynamic that I’m also hearing you say of reading and also being read and that relationship. There’s another metaphor I love about books, that they’re a friend and that it’s a friend that you understand and that also understands you and that kind of thing. And you extrapolate this to nature, of course, too, but I think all of this is very harmonious and it feels necessary to each other.

(33:01):
Yeah. Well, it makes me want to take a book into the woods, I think is kind of what I’m feeling. Well, I do think this brings us, I think this is a good spot, I think to come to a close. And I don’t know, I’m tempted. I’m tempted along a few different paths. Maybe we could just kind of rest here and I’ll be satisfied with the conversation. Or you could read Translation again or a different poem again, maybe to close this out. I don’t know. What would you like to do?

Maurice Manning (33:30):
I’ll read Translation again if that’s…

Ryo Yamaguchi (33:33):
Yeah, yeah, I think we’ll hear it in a new way.

Maurice Manning (33:35):
Okay. Translation. So I came out of my rainy bower covered with white petals dropped from a tree. My people, long ago, whose milky eyes I still can see, would’ve said I had a God’s plenty of petals on me, an expression that I’d like to hear as a boy because I knew it pointed out the obvious only to make it just like that completely something else. But those people are gone away from the world. So I had to say it myself, the God’s plenty of petals that fell when the little rain came down and I happened to be under the tree. I have no idea what plenty is to God, but it riddles my heart to know that someone thought about it once, probably after a day’s work when he was staring at a lantern or sitting on a porch to watch the stars enumerate themselves and struggling to find the words to catch it all. Then finding them.

Ryo Yamaguchi (34:56):
That’s wonderful. I think I hear more the end of the poem, the success of this in achievement. I don’t know, it makes me feel ready, I think this poem to go into the weekend and I don’t know to live the rest of my life, at least for the next few hours perhaps. So thank you so much, Maurice. Thank you so much for sharing these thoughts. This is a really wonderful and searching conversation. I really enjoyed having it. I hope you did too.

Maurice Manning (35:22):
I certainly did. Thank you, Ryo. Thank you very much.

Ryo Yamaguchi (35:26):
Wonderful. Well, and thank you all out there tuning into Line Break. We so enjoy conducting these conversations, and we hope that you find as much as you can in them. We find so much in them, and we’ll see you for the next episode. Thanks everyone.

[End Transcript]