Patricia Clark | February 2022

Ellen Bass

Ellen Bass has published several award-winning books of poetry, including Indigo, Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems have frequently appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and many other journals. She coedited the groundbreaking anthology of women’s poetry No More Masks!, and her nonfiction includes the best-selling The Courage to Heal. Among her awards are Fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and The California Arts Council, three Pushcart Prizes, and the Lambda Literary Award. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Pacific University.

Ellen Bass makes this bold statement about her mission as a poet: “…although sex is plastered all over our world, it’s often [presented] without joy. And often it’s displayed as only for the young and beautiful. I have a small personal mission to write about old sex and ordinary sex, and to celebrate sex as joyous.”

This is one of the reasons I wanted to interview Ellen Bass just in time for the launch of her new book of poems, Indigo—frankness about sensuality is one of the features of Bass’s work that I find very impressive. How does a poet reach such openness and naturalness? I’m curious about how her mind works as a writer and as a poet.

Patricia Clark: Could you talk about what fuels your poetry? I know that so-called “daily life” gives many of us material, but do you go out of your way to read in different subjects, watch movies, etc., thinking of material for poetry and/or widening your range of subjects?

Ellen Bass: Thanks for this good question. I don’t think anyone has ever asked me this. I’m always on the lookout for ideas and images that might enrich my poems. I read a lot of nonfiction, and am especially interested in science. I don’t have a science background, nor do I understand math or chemistry, so often I’m struggling to keep up, but I try! My wife is an entomologist so I have learned a bit about insects. Early on in our relationship, I wrote a poem about snails and said something about their chewing. “Snails don’t chew,” she told me. “They scrape.” That’s when I learned that if you’re going to put something in a poem, it should be accurate. Right now, I’m reading The Endurance about Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctica expedition; The Movie Musical! by Jeanine Basinger; Sallie Tisdale’s Violations, a collection of her excellent essays; Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari; and The Violet House: Great Writers at the End by Katie Roiphe. I don’t usually read so many books at once, but somehow I got overexcited! And I’ve sometimes gotten material from unlikely places. When I was recovering from a hip replacement, I watched the TV series, This is Us. In it, one of the characters was under great stress and went temporarily blind. My ex-husband went blind the night our daughter was born (don’t ask!), and this was the first time I’d ever encountered anyone else having such an experience. Seeing this reflected on TV allowed me to write about it and the birth. This is what art (even TV art) can do for us—it shows us our lives in a way that allows us a different or deeper access. And it’s part of why it’s so important that we have diversity in our books, movies, music, etc.

Clark: What is your mood when you publish a book of poems—for instance, Like a Beggar was published in 2014. Do you remember feeling a sense of anticipation sending it out into the world? Or a sense of loss?

Bass: Definitely not a sense of loss! For me, it’s wonderful to feel that I’ve accomplished poems that are “my personal best,” the best that I’m capable of at that time. Right now, my new book, Indigo, is sitting in galleys on my desk, and I’m excited to send it out into the world to do whatever work it’s capable of.

Clark: How do you start again after a book of poems? Do you just sit down and write a new poem and think, “Okay, that’s going to be the start of a new manuscript?” Do you have any vision in your head, or do you wait (and how long?) to let that develop?

Bass: Sometimes it’s a little hard for me to get started on new poems right after finishing a book. I think that’s because I spend so many months in final revisions, decisions as to what goes in and what is left out, creating the order, etc. that my brain is in a very critical, almost analytical state.

Very different from the open and accepting state of welcoming new poems, first drafts, the messiness of beginnings. But I love the time of getting started again when there’s no pressure to accurately evaluate a poem or get every word right. Instead, I have the freedom to explore, attempt, imagine, tackle new and difficult terrain without it necessarily leading to a successful poem. Often I must make quite a few forays, over a number of years, into a subject or an experience before I discover a way in. So, I give myself a long leash as I start again. I never have a vision of what the next book will be about. I wish I did! For me, it’s always just poem by poem. I write each poem pretty much in isolation, not thinking about the other poems that I’ve written or what I might write next. I am a little jealous of poets who have clear themes. I’d love to experience that. But I’m always happy if I can just get a single poem. And then, when I have a fat enough stack, which takes quite a few years, I start thinking about a book. Picasso said, “What a sad fate for a painter who loves blondes, but who refrains from putting them in his picture because they don’t go with the basket of fruit! What misery for a painter who hates apples to be obliged to use them all the time because they go with the cloth! I put everything I love in my pictures. So much the worse for the things, they have only to arrange themselves with one another.” This is how I feel about my books. My poems just have to arrange themselves with one another.

 

Clark: I’d love to hear more about your beginnings as a poet, eventually getting to some of your literary influences. I recall that you said Florence Howe was a huge influence in your life. That was after college, right?

Bass: I began trying to write poetry in college, and was extremely fortunate to work with Florence Howe who went on to cofound The Feminist Press, the longest running women’s press in the world—celebrating its 50th year this summer, and still as fresh, innovative, and exciting as it was at the beginning. In my freshman year at Goucher College, Florence had just returned from teaching in the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, a project to register African Americans to vote, and that set up temporary schools to educate people, from small children to adults, to engage in social change. The basic premise of the Freedom Schools was to ask questions rather than to overload students with information. Open questions, questions to which there isn’t a right answer, questions that the teacher probably doesn’t have the answer to, were the main approach to teaching.

So, when I entered Florence’s class at Goucher, she began by asking us what we wanted to read, what we wanted to learn, etc. I was flummoxed. Although I didn’t say it, I thought, “You’re the teacher! You should tell us what’s important for us to read and study.” But over time I became a convert, and in my senior year, Florence began a pilot program in which Goucher students taught poetry to boys in a vocational high school in Baltimore, using this open-ended approach, based on questions, careful listening, and, most of all, respect. I taught boys who were studying to become auto mechanics, and what Florence taught me remains the bedrock of my work ever since—both in my teaching and in the work I did with survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

 

A couple years later, I was in graduate school at Boston University, getting an MA in Creative Writing (this was one of the first graduate programs in writing and equivalent to an MFA today). Florence was in town, and she came to visit me. She thought that I was depressed (which I really wasn’t, although I was living with a boyfriend with whom I wasn’t getting along), and Florence’s cure for anything was work. So, she asked me if I’d want to coedit an anthology with her of poems about women. The idea of an anthology of poems by women was so far out of our consciousness that we didn’t even think of it right away. I was thrilled, and jumped at the opportunity, and we began the work on No More Masks! That was one of the happiest—maybe the happiest—work experiences I’ve ever had. I began reading with gusto, and we soon knew that we needed to narrow our focus—I’d started with the ancient Greeks! We decided on the 20th century, and very soon realized that we were more interested in what women had to say about their own lives, thoughts, challenges, dreams, than we were about what men said about them.

Thus, it became an anthology of poems by women. At that time, there was, relatively little—so little—published by women that I was able to read about 95% of all the poetry books published by women from 1900 to 1973. I was a pig in mud!

And yes, we solicited work by poets we admired. Florence knew many of these poets personally, and many generously gave us new work so we didn’t have to pay heavy permission fees (though that is always a challenge in anthologies). We also spread the word through circles that Florence was a part of—and that I (to a lesser degree) was part of—and we put ads in literary journals and such, and so we found a number of new and emerging poets, but mostly we worked from the Radcliffe library that had an excellent collection of women’s poetry. And Xerox had just become available. There was a Kinko’s in Cambridge across the street from the library (or at least that’s where I remember it), and the copying machine was run by Mr. Kinko himself (it was the first Kinko’s!). I’d read and bookmark the pages I wanted us to consider, and then take boxes of books over to Kinko’s, and he’d Xerox away! Florence’s brilliant idea was that if we didn’t type, we couldn’t make typos.

And yes, I was writing poetry then, and several of my poems were included in the anthology. One was about giving head, and I think it might be the first poem on that topic ever to be published!

Clark: Who are your other major literary influences? I was thinking of Dorianne Laux—I believe you said she was a major influence on your work. No doubt you have influences through reading a poet’s work, too—or many poets, that is. We don’t always have to meet poets in person to be influenced by them. Who would some of those be?

Bass: So many poets have influenced me that it would be impossible to name them all! But my two most essential teachers were Anne Sexton, with whom I studied at Boston University, and Dorianne Laux, who generously became my mentor when I returned to poetry after a long (about a dozen years) hiatus when I worked intensively with survivors of childhood sexual abuse. It’s not an overstatement to say that Dorianne taught me everything I know. I’m forever grateful to this triumvirate of Florence Howe, Anne Sexton, and Dorianne Laux.

All three of my essential mentors knew that women’s voices had not been welcomed into the poetry conversation the way men’s voices had been (to say the least!). And they were bold in their own work. Florence, in cofounding The Feminist Press, began by saving “lost” work—books that had been written and published by women, and then went out of print—essentially buried. They published work by Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and went on to publish books by writers of diverse racial and class backgrounds.And then they brought work by writers around the world to North American readers. As you can see, Florence planted the idea deeply in me that women had something to say!

 

Anne Sexton, by the example of her own work, demonstrated that all aspects of a woman’s life have a place in poems—our bodies, our sexuality, motherhood, spirituality, despair, struggle—all of it. The main lesson I learned from her was to expand my poems. The other teachers in the MA program at Boston University were no help at all in teaching me to write. My poems were not good, but their critique was mainly just to delete lines. My already not good poems lost any little bit of life they had in them. Anne encouraged me to write more, to explore and expand. Although I didn’t leave that program writing all that well, at least I left with hope and inspiration to keep at it. Without her, I think I might have given up.

It’s impossible to sum up what Dorianne taught me. She taught me everything, really. She taught me how to read a poem and study what the poet was doing that made it successful, and then to try to do that myself. She showed me what was strong in my poems, and what was weak. She worked with me intensively for a year or two, and we talked every week on the phone, going over my poems. Sometimes, she just did her magic—like reversing the order of the stanzas or suggesting the exact word. Over time, she shared her poems with me as well, and although now and then I had a useful suggestion, mostly I just admired them because she’s an amazing poet! Now we teach together in Pacific University’s MFA program, along with Dorianne’s husband, the poet Joe Millar, and a crew of other terrific poets.

Clark: We need to move along and talk about Indigo, your new book just out in Spring 2020. I love your opening poem—and think you’re quite a “master” of choosing an opening poem in a book. Like “Relax” in Like a Beggar. What I’m impressed with is how, out of a scene and some details, you keep the poem going and manage to tease the poem into some deeper significances without the reader feeling that there’s an “agenda” you’re working on.

Is that something you’re conscious of mastering? It happens in “Sous-Chef” and in other poems in this collection.

Bass: Thank you. Actually, my dear friend—the brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Jericho Brown—chose this as the opening poem for the book, surprising me completely. I hadn’t realized that it was an ars poetica, as well as the poem that could set the context for the book. As for writing the poem itself, I’d been asking for more food to enter my poems for years and finally, in my last book, the muse began to give that to me. I am a bad cook. My wife and my son are terrific cooks. But I am an excellent sous chef. I am competent enough to do what they tell me, but I am almost never tempted to offer an opinion. I wanted to write about that role, but I didn’t know where the poem would go. That’s the best part of writing a poem—that state of letting the poem lead me. I did, though, put my foot down toward the end of the poem. In its original drafts, it kept veering into a more overt love poem, and I sensed this wasn’t what the poem really wanted to be. It was more like a familiar path that the poem was taking just because the path was well-worn, so I asked it where it might go if it didn’t go that way. And the result was more true.

Clark: I notice you didn’t make sections in Indigo or in your last book Like a Beggar. That’s an interesting choice to me—and it seems to add a lot of pressure, I think, when it comes to sequencing the poems. Could you talk about how you came to that decision?

Bass: The poems didn’t fit into sections in either of these books. Especially in Indigo, many of the poems have their own place in time. For example, my dog had to be alive before he was dying. And there were some threads that needed to be woven through the book. Then there were poems that didn’t have a necessary position, and so I tried them out in various places. I find working out the order difficult. I have to work on that in long stretches to hold one possible order in my mind. I ordered and reordered quite a lot, especially in this last book, until finally the poems spoke to each other as well as I felt they could.

Clark: I’m so impressed again and again at your ability to be open, even perhaps ridiculous at times—in a sexual and bodily way. It’s very refreshing; it adds humor and tenderness. It opens the way to so much. I’m thinking of a line near the close of “Taking Off the Front of the House”?: “The Old Lesbians Go to Bed at the End of the Day.” It’s amazing to get there as a person, but how do you do that in a poem, so seemingly easily and naturally?

Bass: “And as she turns toward me and I feel again / the marvelous architecture of her hips.” Yes. The door to writing about the body in a frank way was opened for me by the poets who came before me. Muriel Rukeyser, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton. And then later, Sharon Olds, Toi Derricotte, Dorianne Laux. Thus, I owe—all women writing today owe—a great debt to them. And I also think I was fortunate in not carrying a heavy load of shame around sexuality and my body. The way I think about it is: We all have bodies, we all have fairly similar bodies and body parts; most people have sex, and the sex they have—even with all its variations—is fairly similar too. We’re animals. It’s natural. My grandmother used to call sex “nature.” I ascribe to that.

Clark: I notice your use of anaphora in “Because” and “Pearls,” and also your use of imperative in “Wilderness.” It made me think of something Charles Wright said once, about giving himself little “assignments” to do when he needs or wants to write a poem. A self-assignment, I think he called it. It seems to me those poems are especially wonderful because people think, “Oh, free verse is just simple, no rules, etc., etc.” You’re really using forms here, and the power of rhetoric to “harness” your poem or, to use another metaphor, just to get it moving. How consciously do you decide to use a particular technique like anaphora?

Bass: I’m usually pretty conscious about the form I’m using. I may or may not discover the right form on the first draft, but once I’m working on it, I’m thinking. In “Because,” I knew I needed a form so it didn’t sound like “my sad birth story.” Form can be a way to create tension in a poem, and that’s always what we’re looking for. There’s an unspoken “why” to which the response is “because...” There’s also a response to “Because” that we wait for. Because this, then that. As I wrote the poem, I had a slight anxiety because I had no idea what the that would be. This is the state you want to be in when you’re writing—the state of not-knowing. If you already know what you’re going to say, then there’s not much reason to write the poem. We write to discover something.

Clark: In terms of craft, issues of a poem’s shape, including line and stanza, are often vexing ones to beginning (not to mention advanced) writers. The “typical” Ellen Bass poem (if there is one) from Indigo and Like a Beggar might be a poem of one long block rather than a poem in stanzas—though probably one-third of the poems in Indigo do have stanzas. (I didn’t go through and count in Like a Beggar.) I’m curious, then, what thought you give early in the drafting process to the poem’s shape on the page, and issues like the line and the stanza. Is that something “found” early on? How conscious are you as you write of those choices? Do you generally stay with the shape/form of that initial draft or do you even change it in the revision process? If so, can you think of an example where it changed significantly?

Bass: Often in my very first draft, I’m not at all clear about how the poem will want to be lineated. When I’m writing by hand in a notebook, there may not be lines at all. If I’m typing, I may have some provisional lines. I can hear the rhythm of the lines, but I usually don’t work at them seriously until I’m at least on the second draft—and sometimes much later. Sometimes, though, I have a sense from the beginning that the poem wants a certain line-length and stanza.

In the poem, “Because What We Do Does Not Die,” the lines were originally long lines, and the poem was very long. Then this was pared down over and over, a little at a time. In my poem, “Because” (different poem, same word in the title), my first draft in my notebook begins written in lines, but not in stanzas, and then as I get farther along in that draft, I abandon the attempt at lines altogether, and toward the end wind up with writing some notes, rather than sentences. At that point I went to the computer, and the first typed draft is in couplets.

I’m not sure how helpful any of this is to anyone! I guess, though, that if there is anything useful for me to say about this it’s that I think working on the lineation of a poem seems to developing poets like it should be easier than it is. For me, getting a sense of how my poems wanted to exist on the page was not apparent for a long time. It took a lot of trial and error—and sometimes still does. I see the lines as a guide to the reader; a way to bring out meaning, and a way to work with sound and rhythm. In “Any Common Desolation,” I describe a mother putting a sock on a child, followed by a sentence describing taking a breath as you walk across your yard. One line in that sequence is: “drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath.” I like reading that line. There’s something about hearing cuff and breath so close together that is satisfying to me. If the new sentence, starting with “A breath...” were on the next line and not up there with “cuff,” it wouldn’t sound exactly the same. I’m not a poet who does a very perceptible pause at the end of lines, but there is always a micro-pause, and it’s that tiny hesitation that allows cuff and breath to share air.

Clark: I remember discussions in grad school about sound qualities of poems, and the line as an issue of craft, but I don’t recall much about narrative. It seems to me that your poems are brilliant examples of lyric poems, yes, but also poems that tell stories, so I wonder if you’d talk a bit about narrative craft and how one learns it: telling a story in a poem, figuring out where to start, titling the poem, and all to the end of hoping that a reader is intrigued into the poem and ends up someplace new, not a foregone conclusion but a surprise and a “momentary stay against confusion” perhaps (quoting Frost). Here I am thinking of your poems “Black Coffee,” “How it Began,” “Failure,” and the concluding poems in this latest book, “This Was the Door,” “Ever-Changing Song,” and lastly “Indigo.” Where do your instincts, smart ones, of making narrative come from? Are these learned? Conscious? Intuitive?

Bass: Wow. This is a big question.

Chekhov said that talent is the ability to distinguish the essential from the inessential. For me, there may be some talent involved, but there are also a lot of years of making poems that didn’t succeed. I always come down on the side of “learned” rather than “intuitive,” because I had to study and practice and work for almost everything I know about writing poems. It was not an intuitive kind of magic for me!

When there’s a “story” in a poem, one question is always how much of the story does the reader need to know. I always tell my students that the reader doesn’t care about you. Readers care about themselves. You want your poem to be a window through which a reader can see something more about the experience of being alive. You try to include only what’s essential so the reader’s attention is focused. Anything inessential is distracting. My poem, “Black Coffee” begins: “I didn’t know that when my mother died, her grave / would be dug in my body. And when I weaken, / she is here, dressing behind the closet door, / hooking up her long-line cotton bra, / then sliding the cups around to the front, / leaning over and harnessing each heavy breast, / setting the straps in the grooves on her shoulders, / reins for the journey. She’s slicking her lips with / Fire & Ice. She’s shoveling the car out of the snow.”

Originally, I titled this, “Poem Written in the Sixth Month of My Wife’s Illness.” But does it really matter what the stress is that causes this woman to call upon the memory of her mother? What matters is that she can draw upon her mother’s strength. To do that, she has to conjure her. So, instead of including the situation of the wife’s illness, and instead of talking about how hard it’s been, the poem devotes itself to summoning the mother through extensive detail.

As you say in your question, we want to wind up someplace new. We want to discover something we didn’t know before. We want to be changed. In the title poem of the book, “Indigo,” that happens for me, and I hope it happens for the reader. It took me forty years to write this poem. Not this poem, exactly, but poems that tried to grapple with my dead ex-husband, his impact on my daughter, my regrets, my obsession with those regrets, etc. And then one day I saw a tattooed man pushing his baby in a stroller on West Cliff Drive, and in an instant I understood how I could approach this poem. I had no idea when I saw that man what the ending of the poem would be. So, it was a surprise to me. I write to be changed, and this poem changed me. (Kevin Young and Nicole Sealey discuss “Indigo” and Nicole Sealey’s poem, “A Violence,” on The New Yorker Poetry Podcast)

Clark: Back to the arrangement of poems. I kept noticing little series of poems—let me list eight of these: “Pearls,” “The Kitchen Counter,” “Mammogram Callback with Ultrasound,” “Blame,” “Gopher,” “Because What We Do Does Not Die,” “Marriage,” and “Pushing.” I felt in these a particular “rightness” in being in a sequence—touching on mortality (“die” comes up in “Pearls,” and also “The Kitchen Counter”). Moving on, we go to “Gopher” and its brutality, in a way; on to the “Because” poem, and the incredible ode to the fierce, protective mother, then to a couple of poems (perhaps) about the speaker’s spouse—and issues of trouble and identity, someone asking “why she is living” and the humorous/serious responses with details, love, tenderness. I’m asking if you’re working consciously throughout the book with an arc taking us through something and, hopefully, out the other side?

Bass: Yes, I am. Throughout the book, I’m grappling with the eternal concerns of love and loss, beauty and death, how we accept the life we are living so that instead of resisting it, we root ourselves more thoroughly into it. This is what poetry does for me—both the reading and the writing of it—it helps me remember that each moment has the potential to open itself to me if I pay deep enough attention.

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Patricia Clark is the author of six volumes of poetry, including The Canopy and Sunday Rising. She has also published three chapbooks. Her work has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and has appeared in The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Slate, and Stand. Her newest book is, Self-Portrait with a Million Dollar

Excerpt

from Indigo

Indigo

As I’m walking on West Cliff Drive, a man runs
toward me pushing one of those jogging strollers
with shock absorbers so the baby can keep sleeping,
which this baby is. I can just get a glimpse
of its almost translucent eyelids. The father is young,
a jungle of indigo and carnelian tattooed
from knuckle to jaw, leafy vines and blossoms,
saints and symbols. Thick wooden plugs pierce
his lobes and his sunglasses testify
to the radiance haloed around him. I’m so jealous.
As I often am. It’s a kind of obsession.
I want him to have been my child’s father.
I want to have married a man who wanted
to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much
that he marked it up like a book, underlining,
highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.
Not like my dead ex-husband, who was always
fighting against the flesh, who sat for hours
on his zafu chanting om and then went out
and broke his hand punching the car.
I imagine when this galloping man gets home
he’s going to want to have sex with his wife,
who slept in late, and then he’ll eat
barbecued ribs and let the baby teethe on a bone
while he drinks a dark beer. I can’t stop
wishing my daughter had had a father like that.
I can’t stop wishing I’d had that life. Oh, I know
it’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.
It took eight years for my parents to conceive me.
First there was the war and then just waiting.
And my mother’s bones so narrow, she had to be slit
and I airlifted. That anyone is born,
each precarious success from sperm and egg
to zygote, embryo, infant, is a wonder.
And here I am, alive.
Almost seventy years and nothing has killed me.
Not the car I totalled running a stop sign
or the spirochete that screwed into my blood.
Not the tree that fell in the forest exactly
where I was standing—my best friend shoving me
backward so I fell on my ass as it crashed.
I’m alive.
And I gave birth to a child.
So she didn’t get a father who’d sling her
onto his shoulder. And so much else she didn’t get.
I’ve cried most of my life over that.
And now there’s everything that we can’t talk about.
We love—but cannot take
too much of each other.
Yet she is the one who, when I asked her to kill me
if I no longer had my mind—
we were on our way into Ross,
shopping for dresses. That’s something
she likes and they all look adorable on her—
she’s the only one
who didn’t hesitate or refuse
or waver or flinch.
As we strode across the parking lot
she said, O.K., but when’s the cutoff?
That’s what I need to know.

Reprinted from Indigo. Copyright © 2020 by Ellen Bass. Used with permission of the publisher, Copper Canyon Press. All rights reserved.