TQ36 Guest Poet: Donna Stonecipher
Poetry writing is a holistic proposition, and I believe we ought to talk about craft granularly while we discuss the psychological growth and wellbeing (or lack thereof) that drove it. Since high school, we’ve rightly been New Critically conditioned to separate the speaker from the poet, but I want to restore unity for the sake of this discussion about art making. While we’re feeling retrospective, let’s admit old-school pop cultural influences, personal milestones, relational drama, and makeover montages into the record.
L.J.’s rules of the game:
“The Proustian Questionnaire” is a parlor game lauded by Marcel Proust, the French writer, for its revealing power. To poet-guests, I present all 35 original quiz questions with the Be Kind Rewind version riding parenthetical sidecar—like a madeleine beside the tea. My poet-guests select six from the list to answer: two from The Now, two from The Then, and two from The Way Back When.
Let’s get started:
Reading Donna Stonecipher’s book of prose poems The Ruins of Nostalgia (Wesleyan University Press, 2023) is like walking into a modern art museum’s sparest, highest-ceilinged gallery and hearing, through invisible speakers, the 20th-21st century’s emotional soundtrack played backwards. It’s tough to catalog the way Stonecipher’s prose poems–curios of imagistic delights, aphoristic murmurs, and epistemological epiphanies–pull on your pathos strings, but they do and it hurts. But be not afraid: the whole thing feels lullingly liquid, as though the boxy shape of Stonecipher’s chosen form is actually a glass display window through which we can ogle the lava lamp of our own (meta)extinction. The Ruins of Nostalgia is comprised of 64 prose poems: identically titled, numbered “mise-en-abyme,” each concluding with the titular phrase (save for a few notable exceptions). Stonecipher, author of 6 collections of poetry and prose, knows prose poetry well–having authored Prose Poetry and the City (Parlor Press, 2017), and so she can give you a lesson or ten in Baudelaire’s or Rimbaud’s attitudes about the form, among other things–but Stonecipher’s the one driving both the pen and the “Toyota minivan” now! And she’s in the city–Berlin (where she currently lives) or Seattle (where she grew up) plus myriad other contemporary Elsewheres–embracing the contiguity of prose poetry to tour us–fast! cue delicious time lapse!–through our sociopolitical exceptionalism (“Every pearl is on a continuum with a parasite” or “What have you done with the time, we ask the sand”) past our humorously sentimental myopia (“We felt nostalgic for libraries, even though we were sitting in a library,” or “Symmetry had worn out its welcome, she could see that. Like ornament, like swan kings, like voyaging by the sea. Like the black rotary phones in the antique mall. For symmetry, everyone knew, had been hiding something: interiors that upheld systems of asymmetry” or “our superannuated utopias, our antique ideations of egg creams”) straight on through to deconstructed denouement: “When the future is perfect, we will understand why even with perspective and modernity and post-modernity and the internet and God, we understand nothing, unto infinity, not even why nostalgia is written in the future perfect tense.” These are poems for now, for this Holocene horror scene: “But we lived in commodities, like cowrie shells. We lived in symbols. And then one day we were expelled. For it turns out one can live in a symbol, but only for so long.” And so, less resolved than “deliquesce[d],” we exit, blinking.
I interviewed Donna about her book, her writing life, and the truth of how she got Here.
LJS: First, I was curious about whether speaking German in your day-to-day life has had an effect on your poetry? German words do appear in your poems, but I didn’t detect any syntactical trace.
DS: Yes and no. My husband is Canadian and I’m careful to maintain friendships with native English speakers, so the percentage depends on the day. I do feel that German syntax has messed with my English syntax. There’s a struggle that I’m glad you can’t see the traces of. I do wonder what kind of poet I’d be if I had never moved to this country. You know, if I had just stayed in my native English habitat, would I be a much better poet? I don’t know.
LJS: I don’t know how you could be better. I am just bowled over by this book, and I really hate a lot of the poetry I encounter, so I don’t want you to think I’m an easy mark because I’m not.
[Laughing.]DS: I didn’t get the feeling that you were.
LJS: Which talent would you most like to have? (BKR version: If we look at Gregory Orr’s Four Temperaments—the Myers-Briggs of poetry personality—, order is key. I’m an I-S-M-S (Imagination-Story-Music-Structure though the double ‘s’ of Story and Structure throws an alphabetical wrench into this conceit, so let’s change Story to Narrative; now, that’s better: INMS). What’s your order? And explain how you’ve seen this pattern enacted in your work over time.)
DS: I’ve never heard of this system; it’s intriguing. I guess I would be a S-M-I-N. Without a solid foundation of structure and music, there is no imagination or narrative for me. That’s why each project involves a struggle—or, let’s say, a thrilling quest (ha!)—to find a form. Once I have found the right form, and then the right music, the rest falls into place. The whole impetus to write might begin with a narrative idea or an imaginative moment, but neither of those are strong enough of a foundation for me to build an edifice of poetry. That’s true of The Ruins of Nostalgia—the subject matter was there first, but not a single poem of the book could be written until I had my structure in place: prose poems all beginning and ending with the same phrase. In that sense, I’m kind of a prose-poem formalist.
LJS: How did the form and structure of The Ruins of Nostalgia come about?
DS: Honestly in The Ruins of Nostalgia, it just kind of announced itself. It was pretty easy in that sense. I had been circling around nostalgia as a subject, and I tried to find a title. I had this list–I have to find it somewhere, it’s like this long [gestures with both hands indicating about two feet in length]–that was like the “hm-hm-hm of nostalgia, the duh-duh-duh of nostalgia.” There must be like 25, and “the ruins of nostalgia” was not on the list.
And then the first poems came all at once, and the very first one I wrote (#63, the collection’s penultimate poem) was about the fetishization of ruins, which was kind of a special tourist attraction in Berlin because so many buildings weren’t maintained, especially in the GDR. And so the first one was about ruins, and it crystallized that the book would be titled “the ruins of nostalgia” and that each one would end with that phrase.
LJS: What is your greatest extravagance? (BKR version: Describe The Zone—your most luxurious and extravagant minutes or hours spent writing a poem, a book, a line, a rhyme.)
DS: That zone is my most loved state—when I am in it, everything does feel luxurious and extravagant, I have outwitted time, I have outwitted anxiety, I have outwitted a functionalist view of human life. But sadly, while I always used to give myself automatic permission to write poems when the mood struck me—my brain understood that writing poems always had priority, was always the most important way I could spend my time—these days doubt has crept in, and I find it harder to let myself retreat into that space. I suppose it’s a middle-aged response to a kind of unfortunate tallying: what do I have to show for my life? And how well have I packed away my acorns for eventual (non)-retirement? (Not well.)
LJS: What is the quality you most like in a woman? (BKR version: Have you become the poet you intended to become? If your nascent poet-self were a witness, could they pick your current poems out of a police lineup? Why/why not?)
DS: I don’t think she would be able to. When I first started writing poems as a young girl, it was all about aesthetics for me. I loved beautiful words, beautiful images, and beautiful ways of saying things, and that’s what I looked for in poems, and that’s what I wanted my own poems to do—to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible. Slowly, over time, that notion of beauty got complicated, and I asked for much more from poems—complex thought, and strangeness, and humor, and wisdom, and a kind of zero-at-the-bone intensity. I am still motivated to some degree by beauty, but it’s only one of many aspects. My younger self would probably not find my current poems sufficiently pretty.
LJS: I wonder about that Younger Poet Self. Do you remember the first time you thought you might want to make poems?
DS: Oh yeah! My 6th grade teacher taught us haiku. You know? 5-7-5! An 11-year-old can handle that. And I just...I was off. I suppose the next opportunity I had was a poetry class in high school, and then college, and all the steps, but I still have this blank book–it wasn’t even a proper blank book, but a record book or something–with my handwritten poems from childhood. One says something about how I’m going to be a poet. At age 11. It was just clear.
Before that, I was always drawing. But I could only draw things that already existed. I couldn’t invent things to draw. The artistic urge was always there, and the haiku focused it.
LJS: Do you think that 11-year-old would acknowledge the mastery of what you’re doing? Because it’s beyond beauty; it’s on a different plane.
DS: Thank you! My younger self–I was very ambitious, but I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence because I didn’t grow up in a family of artists, my parents didn’t go to college, my mother worked at a supermarket. I didn’t believe that I had anything important to say. Of course. Right? But I could make pretty things. You know?
LJS: What is your current state of mind? (BKR version: Poets are asked about their Practice all the time, and I marvel at the diversity of responses, ranging from the Hard Hatters to the Bartlebys. Where are you on the continuum?)
DS: I am a Bartleby. That’s mostly because usually, if I try to write poetry while I would prefer not to, the results are not good. So there’s no point in trying. Prose is different; with prose you kind of have to approach it with a more workmanlike dedication, show up at the desk every day, etc., because there’s simply so much more ground to cover.
LJS: I’m glad to hear you say that because it’s kind of how I move. And I’ve never been sure: is that how I move because I’ve allowed it? Or because I was teaching and back-burnering drafting until summer? Or was it because I’m a mother and familial and domestic responsibilities were always priority? So, in other words, I was unsure whether the manner in which I work is a kind of inchoate pattern and is actually the best I can do? …And the guilt associated with not enforcing silence for the application of rigor or regularity to the drafting process...do you feel that?
DS: No.
[Laughter.]I mean...well...I’d love to be more productive. I’d love to have twice as many books by now, like some people. But that’s just not how it works for me. I was just on a residency in Denmark, and I applied to that residency partly because I wanted an external push. I’ve been writing prose for a couple years now, and poetry has been really back-burnered, and I was like, “I miss it, and maybe an external impetus will squeeze some out.” Like it’s waiting, entubed in me or something and needs a squeeze. And it actually worked, but I wrote something that I wasn’t expecting to write and didn’t really want to write. [Eyes squinched closed, head shaking “no” vigorously]. And there it is.
But I felt obligated, because I had applied with this project to write poetry there, and so I did it. But I don’t know if I can use this poem.
LJS: What do you consider your greatest achievement? (BKR version: In your most recent “good” poem (or collection), of what are you most proud? Explain.)
DS: I am proud of ending each poem in The Ruins of Nostalgia with the phrase “the ruins of nostalgia,” and having it feel right, different, and earned, every time. At least, I’d like to think so. It was very much a challenge to end 64 poems the same way (well, 62 or so; I decided to mix it up on a few of them) and I am proud of rising to it. I’m glad to have the opportunity to mention it partly because, ahem, I think I made it look easy, but it was not!
That was the only formal constraint, and it was not enough. [Laughs with chagrin.]
So for every poem, I had to find some kind of rhythm–obviously they’re not lineated–it’s been a long time, but when you lineate a poem, a rhythm is created when you start breaking lines. You very quickly find yourself in a rhythm (and it’s usually a rhythm you’ve read somewhere else—you know, we’re all influencing each other). But for these poems, there was no template, and each poem felt like reinventing the wheel, which is very annoying when you write serial poems. [Cackles.]
I also had the sense, I think for the first time, that I was operating on a much bigger field than in previous books. Like, this is not just a book of poetry, it is part of a discourse on a topic.
LJS: Once you’d gotten some momentum on this project, did you have any realizations of, “Oh, this is a really neat bit of choreography that I can pull off in a prose poem or there’s a certain amount of surprise available to me here?” I think the beauty of prose poetry is its contiguousness. And so, I have always felt like the treatment of History...you know, when you look at paintings–Landscapes, Self-portraits, Nudes, Genre, Histories–I feel like prose poetry is the perfect form for Histories. Because of its contiguousness, you can whip through a time lapse in a way that’s super pleasing within that box.
And you’ve done it, but you’ve turned it on its head too. We’re swinging temporally from the past to the future, and where we land is...in a place where we have to trust your voice: a clever mentor through the warp. To mediate any potential grandiosity of pendulum-swinging from the past to the future, were you ever tempted to lineate?
DS: I love the idea that the prose poem might be particularly suited to writing about history, although I think immediately of great lineated poems about history. There are always exceptions. But, yeah, the contiguity is important. In this project, was I tempted to lineate those poems? Did I ever try? I probably tried. I’m always trying to lineate. [Chuckles.] And it just doesn’t work. I don’t know...it hasn’t worked for thirty years. I should stop trying.
LJS: Let’s talk about how you came to prose poetry.
DS: When I first started writing prose poems, I was reading Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Reproduction of Profiles and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, both of which I adored, and it just sort of happened.
Let’s see, I’ve written a book about prose poems (Prose Poems and the City) and so I’m thinking about what Baudelaire thought the prose poem was, and Rimbaud...
Well, I do feel more in this book than in other books of prose poems I’ve written that I’m almoooost breaking the membrane of “poem.” I feel that I’m pushing against...I don’t know what exactly, into what. Essay? Aphoristic fragments? I don’t know what I would call them if I didn’t call them poems. I worked really hard on the language, to have a lot of internal rhyme, repetition, metaphor, music, all the things we associate with poetry, so I was very conscious of trying to make them capital ‘P’ poetic.
I never set out to be a prose poet and I don’t really like that title. I’ve always insisted I’m a poet, I’m just a poet.
LJS: What’s your favorite poem in the book?
DS: Favorite? [Pauses.] Yeah, I do have a favorite. It’s #24. This is one of the ones where I allowed myself to deviate from the constraint and it doesn’t end with “the ruins of nostalgia.”‘ This one pretty much poured out after I read a newspaper article about this house in Seattle. This one still gets me.
LJS: It strikes an emotional chord for you?
DS: Yeah. Yeah, just even looking at it right now.
LJS: Can you say more about that?
DS: You know, it’s probably because I’m working on a project about the house I grew up in. This poem is partly about our house. It’s not just about the nominal house. And just, in Seattle, so many houses are being destroyed. It’s gut-wrenching. This house was actually saved for now, but then there is this question of the enormous space these single-family houses are taking up, and yet how precious the houses themselves are, and so I think that’s why I still feel compelled by this poem. I don’t have any answers, and I’m still trying to work this out.
LJS: When and where were you happiest? (BKR version: When you think about poems as compared to the discrete units produced in other art forms—songs, paintings, dances, novels, etc.—, what is it that makes you happiest about a poem?)
DS: What makes me happiest about a poem, I think, is that poetry by its very nature attracts complexity, and it creates a welcoming space for ambivalence, and for ambiguity—things that most of the rest of the world can’t abide. The world is endlessly complex, and poems allow a field for complex things to be worked out. I don’t think this is as true of other art forms, and as a profoundly indecisive and often ambivalent person myself, I cherish poetry’s capaciousness in that regard.