I interviewed a fairly famous poet last month on assignment for a magazine. I knew it would be a strange afternoon, as I've interviewed tons of musicians and artists, but never an established writer... and certainly not a poet. Not to say I don't like poets; I get along with poets well enough -- our worlds aren't all that different, really -- but I had a level of anxiety on the drive to her house that I'm not used to feeling, and all I could chalk it up to was that her artform is a medium I've always felt outside of. I can understand poetry, but I can't often understand the act of writing it. Generally, I can't write it; and if I do, it either ends up here or buried somewhere where no one will ever find it.
I knew it would be a strange afternoon, but I didn't bank on it being one of the strangest interactions I've ever had with a source.
Before our interview, I borrowed all her books from Ross and perused them, reading five or six poems from every collection, including her latest one. From her latest, I gathered that she'd been raised under the heavy hand of a Protestant preacher dad, and that it took her a very long time to overcome how worthless it made her feel as a woman. I felt like I related to this experience, so I added a relevant question to my list: "How long did it take you to be able to write this book without resentment?"
So I get there, we go to her backyard writing studio, she offers me a dollop of hand lotion, I accept. I get the distinct feeling that I'm being observed, interpreted, read, but not in an intimidating way -- much more an innocent, open thing; it almost reminded me of being in a room with a child, how she reacted to me reacting to her. It was strange, but I started to adapt to the situation.
Then, I asked her that question, but I prefaced it with, "I had a similar experience..." which proved to be...kind of a mis-step on my part. See, I hadn't read the whole book, and the poems I was referring to were close to the beginning and toward the end. She thought I was talking about the middle.
She snapped out of her poet-in-interview setting, her eyes opened wide, her voice lowered to a whisper. She leaned in and said, "Oh my God, I'm so happy you're alive. Some people kill themselves."
I panicked. At that point, I knew we weren't talking about the same similar experience, but I wasn't sure which one she was thinking of, and I realized that I could very easily blow the interview to smithereens if I didn't give the right performance at that very moment. It wasn't that I wanted to carry on a facade, especially one of this *clearly* heavy caliber, but this woman, this famous poet, had just opened up to me on such a personal level that if I had acted as confused as I was, she might've felt terribly rejected or something. I didn't want to do that to her; I didn't have it in me. So what I did next, I did out of respect.
I broke her stare and eyed the ground, muttered a weak "yeah" and accepted her uplifting words, even though they weren't meant for me. Her face became so motherly, the entire tone of our conversation changed after that. Words started falling out of her mouth, forming stories and anecdotes and all manners of pearly wisdoms and struggle-earned lessons. She talked to me as if she were talking to a younger version of herself, thankfully not entirely about our "shared" experience, but about all the parts of the world she's seen, about how much better life gets when you listen to the iceberg beneath. About how writing poetry has healed her, forced her to look at where she came from with respect to how it may have gotten her to the present. There weren't many questions after that; she answered them all before I got the chance to ask...and she told me something off-the-record that I really shouldn't ever tell another soul about. I don't plan to.
Josh came in after awhile to take some photos, and our interview more or less ended. As we said our goodbyes, she grabbed me by both shoulders and said, "Hang in there, it gets so much better! You will make it!" I thanked her and hugged her tight. Josh looked on in utter confusion.
The second I got home, I pored through her latest book to figure out what our "common ground" was. It was every bit as terrible as I expected, and she didn't make a secret of it: her father molested her, likely for years. She wrote about it in the form of fairy-tale, smack in the middle of the book -- the one I should have read all the way through before I met her.
I still feel like a total dick about it.
I knew it would be a strange afternoon, but I didn't bank on it being one of the strangest interactions I've ever had with a source.
Before our interview, I borrowed all her books from Ross and perused them, reading five or six poems from every collection, including her latest one. From her latest, I gathered that she'd been raised under the heavy hand of a Protestant preacher dad, and that it took her a very long time to overcome how worthless it made her feel as a woman. I felt like I related to this experience, so I added a relevant question to my list: "How long did it take you to be able to write this book without resentment?"
So I get there, we go to her backyard writing studio, she offers me a dollop of hand lotion, I accept. I get the distinct feeling that I'm being observed, interpreted, read, but not in an intimidating way -- much more an innocent, open thing; it almost reminded me of being in a room with a child, how she reacted to me reacting to her. It was strange, but I started to adapt to the situation.
Then, I asked her that question, but I prefaced it with, "I had a similar experience..." which proved to be...kind of a mis-step on my part. See, I hadn't read the whole book, and the poems I was referring to were close to the beginning and toward the end. She thought I was talking about the middle.
She snapped out of her poet-in-interview setting, her eyes opened wide, her voice lowered to a whisper. She leaned in and said, "Oh my God, I'm so happy you're alive. Some people kill themselves."
I panicked. At that point, I knew we weren't talking about the same similar experience, but I wasn't sure which one she was thinking of, and I realized that I could very easily blow the interview to smithereens if I didn't give the right performance at that very moment. It wasn't that I wanted to carry on a facade, especially one of this *clearly* heavy caliber, but this woman, this famous poet, had just opened up to me on such a personal level that if I had acted as confused as I was, she might've felt terribly rejected or something. I didn't want to do that to her; I didn't have it in me. So what I did next, I did out of respect.
I broke her stare and eyed the ground, muttered a weak "yeah" and accepted her uplifting words, even though they weren't meant for me. Her face became so motherly, the entire tone of our conversation changed after that. Words started falling out of her mouth, forming stories and anecdotes and all manners of pearly wisdoms and struggle-earned lessons. She talked to me as if she were talking to a younger version of herself, thankfully not entirely about our "shared" experience, but about all the parts of the world she's seen, about how much better life gets when you listen to the iceberg beneath. About how writing poetry has healed her, forced her to look at where she came from with respect to how it may have gotten her to the present. There weren't many questions after that; she answered them all before I got the chance to ask...and she told me something off-the-record that I really shouldn't ever tell another soul about. I don't plan to.
Josh came in after awhile to take some photos, and our interview more or less ended. As we said our goodbyes, she grabbed me by both shoulders and said, "Hang in there, it gets so much better! You will make it!" I thanked her and hugged her tight. Josh looked on in utter confusion.
The second I got home, I pored through her latest book to figure out what our "common ground" was. It was every bit as terrible as I expected, and she didn't make a secret of it: her father molested her, likely for years. She wrote about it in the form of fairy-tale, smack in the middle of the book -- the one I should have read all the way through before I met her.
I still feel like a total dick about it.
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