Collin Berry | February 2022

Collin Berry

Spencer Reece is a poet of careful attention, a memoirist of complete honesty, and a visual artist of controlled vision. His debut collection of poetry, The Clerk’s Tale (2004), was selected by Louise Glück as the winner of the Bakeless Poetry Prize, and his second book of poetry, The Road to Emmaus (2013), was a longlist nominee for the National Book Award. Reece is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Fulbright grant which allowed him to live in Honduras for a year and produce the book Counting Time Like People Count Stars, a collaborative work with the orphans of Our Little Roses Home in San Pedro Sula. He is also the author of two books published in 2021, a memoir titled The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir and a book of watercolors titled All The Beauty Still Left.

Collin Berry: I was so delighted to explore your new book of watercolors All The Beauty Still Left simply because, as might be the case with many of your readers, I was unaware you are a visual artist. Can you start by saying how long have you been painting, and what inspired this project?

Spencer Reece: I’ve been painting for years, actually... but it was always something I sort of hid under a bushel. Either I didn’t think anyone was interested or I didn’t consider them worthy. An old friend, a waitress turned real estate agent in West Palm Beach Florida, kept insisting the paintings had value, and for years kept at me to do more. I’ve had a traveling life; somewhat to my shock, I’ve had so many zip codes it would make your head spin, and with all that moving, painting always grounded me, kept me steady. My parents also drew and painted in their long marriage. Mom often told me that on Dad’s side of the family I was related to Benjamin West, a famous portrait painter, and that’s where it came from. Maybe so.

Berry: The introduction to the book implies you are in a period of transition. Back in the United States after years abroad, taking care of your parents, wondering what will be next. Is the book somehow meant to be, like you mentioned, a way of grounding yourself in a certain place or state of mind? Or perhaps a way of grounding yourself in the memories of where you have been?

Reece: Yes, I am forever trying to anchor myself, but as Jesus said, the foxes have their dens, the birds their nests, but the Son of Man will have no place to lay his head... that oddly comforts me.

Berry: You include the following quote from Lois W., the cofounder of Al-Anon Family Groups: “Hearts understand in ways our minds cannot.” Similarly, would it be correct to say that paintings understand in ways our poems cannot?

Reece: I think paintings do understand in a way that poems do not. Although Ellen Bryant Voigt said that painting was “the sister art” to poetry, painting usually has no words. I think Voigt meant they have a similar soul-spark. They do. But when I am stripped of words, as a poet, that does something to my head, something beautiful to my ego deflation! A painting reaches me immediately through color and shape: with a poem—I need to read it, metabolize it—it’s a very different process.

Berry: Your paintings are vibrant in color, but most lack any human subject, which, as I experienced them, brought about a certain loneliness. The Lorca quote you included reads, “At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.” What emotions do you hope your watercolors bring about in viewers?

Reece: I’ve no idea how these images will be received as I never really thought they ever would be received by anybody. You are right, there probably is a certain loneliness to them. I think a certain kind of loneliness has always followed me. Now, when I was younger I might think “Poor me!” when I wrote that, but I don’t feel that really in the least. I’ve had a lucky life. I’ve lived all over the world, and when you do that there’s loneliness: other cultures, other languages, nights when you don’t know anybody, which also makes space for painting and writing. And being a poet or painter are largely lonely endeavors. The loneliness turns into a kind of comfort and solace. There is also great joy and freedom in such a life, whether that comes through in the paintings I don’t know.

Berry: The watercolors seem to exhibit both extreme control and a sort of intentional chaos. What can you say about your process when you begin a piece?

Reece: I was usually traveling, so I saw something and wanted to fix it for a moment. What always comes to me is surprise. As I paint, what comes out of me is not exactly what is in front of me, but a kind of translation: sometimes the colors are more vibrant than what I saw simply because I wanted them to be.

Berry: I love the quote you included by Yo Yo Ma: “Each day I move toward that which I do not understand. The result is a continuous accidental learning which constantly shapes my life.” Are these watercolors a means of moving toward that which you do not understand? And how is your creation of watercolors connected to your creation of poems?

Reece: The two arts are connected I suppose by wonder: wonder in the natural world, wonder in color, that I can see. I had a friend in Madrid who is blind, and she swore she didn’t miss seeing because she’d never seen anything in her life. I don’t know what that is like. That I can see all these colors and shapes excites me. It’s a beautiful world we’ve been given, you know? Poetry is mystery. Painting is mystery. Church is mystery. I’m drawn to all three. And I scarcely know why.

Berry: To move to your poetry—in “ICU,” the opening poem of The Road to Emmaus, you write, “It is correct to love even at the wrong time.” This line sort of hung over my reading of the collection, and also colored in retrospect my takeaway from The Clerk’s Tale. Can you say anything about how this sentiment relates to your work as a whole?

Reece: That line came to me somehow, I wasn’t sure what it meant to me, “correct to love even at the wrong time.” I began to get a hunch that the second book was an utterly different enterprise than the first. I sought to go deeper. I sought out a new sound. Louise Glück had encouraged me to change myself as much as I could, or stretch myself as much as I could. I recall those words almost as her withholding blessing to me, but I may be remembering it wrong. Certainly it’s something her wonderful arc of a career shows; like Picasso, she kept reinventing and pushing her art. I am not sure I would have pushed myself so hard to trouble myself into a new voice had I not met Louise when I did. In any event, the second book is driven, I see now, by my reconciliation and forgiveness, a softer sound than damage which rules the first book. And to love even at the wrong time is asking for a great forgiveness, to let go of control, to let go of ego. It’s the direction I am moving in. It’s quieter than what kind of cymbal smash I might have made had I tried to recapture elements of my first book. I don’t regret it. I’d say my next book is now about love. What comes after reconciliation.

Berry: I have read that as a young man you attended an Episcopal preparatory school in Minneapolis for thirteen years, daily chapel being a part of the required curriculum. Can you remember what your relationship was with the language of Episcopal liturgy as you grew as a young person? Did it have a pronounced effect on you? Or were you more fed by the language of the poets you began to read in adolescence?

Reece: I realize now, at this stage, that poetry led me more to my religion than my religion led me to my religion. I did have chapel every day for thirteen years, which is a lot of liturgy, and a lot of readings from The Book of Common Prayer. However, this was Minnesota in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the school at the time was rather humble and small and certainly not anything you would call “high Anglican.” I think, what that gave me was a certain comfort. I think the structure and order of chapel every day helped me, especially in my adolescence. Adolescence is probably just the most difficult passage for everyone.

Berry: What was it about that structure and order that helped you? Did they make the difficult passage of adolescence more bearable in some way?

Reece: Structure and order give meaning to chaos. The prep school was talking about faith in all those hymns and homilies. I don’t think I knew what that meant. I don’t think I knew what prayer really meant. But it was giving me a glimmer. And the structure and order I could follow. My parents had a volatile dependent grand love affair that often involved argument and drink. It was very hard for me to be in that marriage at times. It was like I lived in an Edward Albee play. I think it forced me into poetry, which is a very great thing. And painting. And any other way I could seek to create something outside myself and lose myself to a concentration while two parents argued for hours. The school gave me that structure too. It was a great thing. And my parents gave it to me!

Berry: Can you tell me a bit about your recent memoir?

Reece: The title for the book is The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir published by Seven Stories Press in the spring of 2021. I’ve been at work on the nonfiction book for seventeen years. I wanted to write something that paid tribute to the poets that saved my life. When I was catapulted for a brief moment into poetic celebrity seventeen years ago with a write-up in The New York Times, an appearance on CNN, and a publication in The New Yorker—it was a wild moment, particularly after so many years of obscurity and isolation. One thing you learn if you enter the public like that is the reporters, all certainly, from my experience, well-meaning usually, have an “angle” for their story before they even arrive at your house. The compelling aspect of my story was that I appeared out of nowhere, working in a mall, and I had submitted my manuscript three hundred times, and being rejected each time until Louise Glück selected it. The reporters liked the idea that I’d come out of such extreme isolation; I can’t blame them. It made for great copy. It gave people hope. What was missing was all those poets, mainly dead, who’d helped me get there to that moment. That’s where the impetus came to write the book.

Along the way, I became a priest. It was an unusual choice for sure. And I often get asked why. So, this book always seeks to lean into that question and explore it through the poetry of my heroes. They are certainly odd choices for making a living: a priest and a poet. Being a poet is something I’d never say crossing a border and presenting my passport and asked what I did for a living. Wearing a collar, dressed in black, if I cross a border, it’s all too clear what I do. Yet, both things deal with the invisible mainly. In some ways it’s much easier now saying I am a priest. I continue to avoid announcing myself as a poet, but surely that is exactly what I am and have been for much longer than a priest!

Berry: Is it an issue of vocational title? As in, you feel comfortable calling yourself a priest because it is your primary livelihood, while your being a poet is something more private and related to self?

 

Reece: If you announce yourself to be a poet it sounds so strange to my ear, either it’s like saying “I’m a unicorn” or “I’m a yeoman,” something that has no practical application. Because, for my entire adult life, I’ve had to make my living from jobs where I guess I think practically. But behind that answer I see I am hiding a little; it’s the relief Wallace Stevens must have felt or Stevie Smith... We poets need to protect our delicate thin worlds. It’s the luckiest thing on earth to be a poet, I sometimes think. I am so grateful for it. Now saying I am priest is a bolder move for me than it was saying I worked at Brooks Brothers. But it’s time for me to be bold.

Berry: In the memoir you weave your relationship with the work of multiple poets into the narrative of your life. Plath, Bishop, Herbert… Of Plath you write, “Through the child-like sing-song maniacal tone she was able to speak a truth that her adult consciousness troubled to accept.” I would argue that you do not really utilize a “child-like sing-song” tone in your work, but do you consciously or unconsciously use language to tackle issues your adult consciousness has trouble accepting? I am thinking of the title poem from The Clerk’s Tale and how the “old homosexual” may have been a vehicle for you to explore or express your own homosexuality. In other words, what is your method for tackling issues that the adult consciousness has trouble confronting?

Reece: This is a good question, and I want to quickly say “I don’t know.” But that doesn’t help your investigation much. I think though I don’t know what I am doing half the time. It only occurs to me later, much later. That might have been true for Plath too. It’s after I’ve written something, sometimes years later, that I understand it. In the last two books, and then again, in my upcoming book of poetry, not due out until 2024, there is always lurking an older male figure I am engaged with as the speaker of the poems. Why? I ponder this in the nonfiction book. I don’t have an adequate answer really. I do notice, and I say this in the nonfiction book, that something is changing with me as I myself now age; I’m fifty-eight. What is happening now is that I am organically mentoring more young writers, often younger men, and that I’m becoming the father figure I was so much in pursuit of in my early days. All to the good.

Berry: At multiple points in the memoir, you make startling religious comparisons. Take, for instance, a line from Devotion 6: “The crazy woman in the nuthouse fascinated me. What was her room like? She was exotic as Jesus.” Or from Devotion 7, after a suicide in your high school: “There he swung in the Minnesota afternoon back and forth, back and forth, the way a crucifix hangs and swings around a priest’s neck.” Do you often find yourself, in life and in writing, comparing the secular and the religious in unexpected ways?

Reece: I do find myself comparing the secular and religious in unexpected ways. I think because I didn’t grow up churchy, and in a somewhat eccentric household, it gave me the liberty to “play” with religious symbols more than perhaps someone who’d grown up in a more orthodox home.

Berry: I found myself somewhat startled in these moments. Is that your intended effect?

Reece: Poetry can startle of course. I don’t know what I was intending. The surreal images come to me; it’s like sparks and colors go off in my head, and I write them down. I’m rara avis, I know it, and so I see things from that perch.

Berry: In an interview with Curtis Fox and Poetry Off the Shelf you discuss two poems, one by George Herbert and one by James Merrill. In the interview, you seem to read God or Christ into the poems in a way your interviewer did not exactly. Do you find this to be a practice of yours? To read God or Christ into poems where it may not be immediately apparent? What indicators do you look for when reading in this way?

Reece: Yes! I remember that interview and we did read the Herbert poem completely differently, which surprised me, but why should it really? Who reads poems Christo-centrically these days? With Herbert, it’s rather fluid to read God and Christ into everything he wrote because that’s how he thought. He’s a touchstone for me as I write in the Secret Gospel of Mark. Once I read him, I was in a sense converted. I wanted to be him. And I actually never went back on that.

Berry: Of Bishop you write in the memoir, “Maybe, the professor coaxed us, Bishop had faith in poetry, in the clarity and accuracy she strove for there, and could that serve as a kind of religion to her, a way of navigating the world?” When you look back on your development into becoming a priest, do you see something similar here? Was poetry your religion before you took on fulltime priesthood? Does poetry remain a sort of religion for you?

Reece: I think poetry is a sort of religion to me, really. I love it more than anything else. And I’ll never be able to fully explain why. Another project I have going on the back burner is a book called Latter Prophets, which is a series of appreciations of living poets—I’m slowly working my way through so many wonderful talented artists and publishing those here and there—and it seems to be modern poets are like prophets in the desert, and in each of my appreciations I look to see where God is in their work, or isn’t... nearly all write spiritually and nearly all circumvent religion. That interests me! I’ve done Marie Howe, Jericho Brown, Christian Wiman, Michael Collier, Ruben Quesada. I’m soon to do Sheila Maldonado and Rick Barot. I want to do some writers from Britain and Australia… because I’ve lived abroad the last ten years, I’ve come more into contact with an international community, and I’d like this future book to reflect that.

Berry: Also of Bishop, you recognize in the memoir her ability to use somewhat simple rhyme schemes to access or enhance deep truth. I see this sometimes in your poetry as well. I am thinking of “Chiaroscuro” in The Clerk’s Tale or “My Great-Grandmother’s Bible” in The Road to Emmaus. What do you think is the power of using such a form?

Reece: Elizabeth Bishop I think had a major effect on me in many ways. I ponder these in the book. I did take from her a few things: one, it didn’t matter how much I published, probably less would be better than more, and delay would help me: and two, her impulse to hold back or withhold can often ramp up her poems quite nicely, and her love of form, for I love form too, and I think often about it.

Berry: In terms of form, I’m very interested to hear how you go about constructing your longer poems. I’m thinking of poems like “Monaco,” “Gilgamesh,” or “The Road to Emmaus.” With poems like these, did you set out to write long pieces, or do they grow from something smaller?

Reece: “Monaco,” “Gilgamesh” and “The Road to Emmaus,” were all longer poems. I’d not written at that length before. I’m not writing at that length now; I’ve gone back to the lyric; I missed the lyric! Part of them being long was setting out to differentiate from the first book. Part of it was those three poems simply told me they would be long. “Monaco” I worked on for seventeen years and was a carry-over from the first book. I wrote it slowly, added and subtracted; I wanted to write a fable. “Gilgamesh” I wanted to put together fragments to make up an invisible gay love story. So many have felt invisible—women, Blacks, Asians, Latinx brothers and sisters, gays, and Indigenous—and we’ve been hearing from those margins in the last decade or so, it’s quite wonderful how they’ve all rushed in. To be gay was a great shame for me, and I myself made myself invisible, so with that poem I was seeking to slowly sketch it, a marriage that was not a marriage with a man I knew and loved to death. “The Road to Emmaus” I worked on seven years. I first tried to make it a small poem, a page say. But it kept resisting me. I think that’s the hardest damn poem I ever wrote. It failed so many times, and I’m not sure it still isn’t something of a failure, but its failure is the measure of its success, if that makes any sense. I was writing about a person who was impossible! That poem got written by showing it to his sister every year and the last year before I finished it the sister said, “There is something you do not know...” And then that went into the poem. Now she is dead too, and I was able to expand a little on the writing of it in the poet’s memoir which felt like the final end to that sad, sad tale. Life is so crazy, really: Durell saved my life, you see, and he was also so very difficult. Both things were true simultaneously; it was a lived negative capability! If Durell could not save himself he would save me; it was the most generous act of a deeply failed closeted homosexual, and I am so glad I honored him the best I could. Every time someone tells me they have read that poem and it meant something to them, my heart lightens: there is not one other poem I feel so intensely about as that one.

Berry: In my reading of The Book of Common Prayer—the primary liturgical text in the Episcopal church—what jumps out at me is rhythm, in both the language and the organization. There is so much potent rhythm in how passages are put together, and there seems to be a seasonal rhythm in terms of how the church chooses to organize its year. What can you say about the function of rhythm in Episcopal liturgy?

Reece: Well, I’ve been in the Episcopal church in Spain for the last decade, followed by a year in Honduras, so actually as a practicing priest I’ve only conducted services in Spanish. It’s been an unusual career to be sure, and one that keeps surprising me, so my appreciation of the liturgy has come through speaking it all in Spanish and learning how to do that and understanding what I was saying. This took many, many years. Humility has branded itself into my being when it comes to thoughts of me doing liturgy.

Berry: Having experienced the liturgy in both English and Spanish, does your ear or mind prefer one over the other?

Reece: When I speak Spanish in a liturgy it feels like a miracle is happening inside of my body. I love the language and the people so much and well, it’s almost religious. Honduras in so many ways made me the priest I became. After this pandemic and return to the States after ten years in Europe, it is looking like I might be going to a small church, in a very high liturgy, in a quiet private town called Lithgow, New York. There I will be asked to do the liturgy in the highest and oldest way, which I haven’t done so much. For a while, I chanted the gospel in a New York church called Saint Luke’s. So, I imagine, it will give me a renewed respect for our liturgy. I’m excited and surprised. Though, I feel myself turning again, turning towards the quiet and the mystical. My first ten years of priesthood entailed among other things, creating a documentary film and an international literary festival and author series, and I feel now something else stirs in me with this possible call to the countryside and a church smaller than an ambulance with a large graveyard out back where Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter is buried. Who knows what the Lord has in store? I’m open.

Berry: How would you compare presenting a service in the church with presenting a poetry reading?

Reece: I founded the Unamuno Author Series in Madrid in 2012, and it still continues there. I would run the series when I wasn’t doing my priest job in Madrid. It was a full life! I always noticed how people sometimes sighed at the end of a poetry reading and that the sigh was sometimes similar to after a priest’s sermon. I think people going to poetry readings are entering into revival tents without realizing it. For me, as a priest, who is also a poet, I learned that when I give a poetry reading, I read the poem I wrote from the page. When I give a sermon I memorize an outline and look at the people. The two things couldn’t be more different, but hopefully have a similar effect, that is, illumination and communion.

Berry: In your memoir, you talk in depth about your experience in Alcoholics Anonymous. Do you see AA as a sort of second church for you? Do you see its language as a sort of liturgy from which one can draw comfort the way one might draw comfort in a church setting?

Reece: Yes, I do see AA as a church, an invisible church, like what it must have been like in the first century. That’s just my take; some members would be appalled to hear AA compared to church. Many people have been harmed by the church, and I respect that. AA or Al-Anon have no religious affiliation. I do. Again, just like all those chapel services, there is something comforting to me in the routine of AA or Al-Anon, that has saved me. I’ve had a lucky life. Church provides this routine as well. Sometimes church can be stiff and fussy and formal. Not my favorite moments. But it is what it is... es lo que hay as we would say in Spanish. I go to both wells for sustenance.

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Collin Berry has an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in West Branch Wired, Past Ten, Open Minds Quarterly, and elsewhere. In October 2022 his poem “When All Is Full” will appear as a part of Dr. William Payn's choral work titled Love.

excerpt

from The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir

Devotion 8

The TV sets had all gone to color. The Ed Sullivan Show introduced Diana Ross, who sang with the Supremes. How Diana Ross glowed and shimmered with her sequins for the American public as she demanded that we stop in the name of love. She shimmied right at me. I shimmied right back at her. I assumed she knew something I knew. My parents laughed now as if there had been no arguing in the other room. A wild feminine energy bubbled inside me as my brother threw his rattle at me, looking like a tiny judge in his high chair. Something might be wrong with me. I would need to be punished severely. What could my grandmother say to her Catholic priest about this, behind a screen in a confessional booth in Hartford? I swiveled my hips. I wagged my finger back at her. We were both being hurled forward, catapulted by difference. It was important my parents not witness my dance. Diana and I both began dancing faster and faster and faster and faster. We wanted to prevent elimination. We understood each other.

Excerpted from The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir. Copyright © 2021 by Spencer Reece.
Used with permission of the publisher, Seven Stories Press. All rights reserved.