LICHEN SONGS and WEST OF PARADISE*
INTERVIEWS WITH GEORGE VENN
|
by Will Bowman
Broadcast date: (9/8/2106) Transcribed and edited by George Venn 3/20/21 |
* West of Paradise interview begun 1/13/2015, completed 1/13/21 • Lichen Songs interview broadcast 9/8/2016, La Grande Studio
) WB: George, in your poetry, essays, and stories, place is a big theme. You seem to say that place and location aren’t the same thing. Place implies a unity of the human spirit with geography, with location. A location itself is impotent. Only through the joining of the human in a healthy, serendipitous relationship does it become place, a microcosm in which both people and artists can thrive, find meaning, and create. Am I getting this right? How have you developed this respect for place in life and writing?
GV: Place became important to me while growing up, partly because I lived in five different towns before I finished the eighth grade. During those years of moving town to town for schooling, the one stable center was my grandparents’ rural farm in Alder. From infancy to marriage I lived every summer with them and always intuitively felt their farm was my home. During those boyhood summers, place also became significant in another way: I worked with my grandfather, a migratory beekeeper, who taught me the significance of a good location: honey bees flourished with fields of bloom, gathered tons of nectar, made a living, gave us a harvest to take home. Always moving between town and country also heightened my awareness of different places, cultivated my intuitive awareness of place. If I’m writing, place can become literal or metaphoric, symbolic or allegorical–a place to stand, a hellhole, a paradise, a glass mountain. Also, memorizing the King James Bible introduced me to lots of mythic places. If I don’t know where to begin, places speak to me and I start to listen. I’m grounded, As Stegner once said, “You can’t high jump from a pan of jello.”
WB: Speaking of place, many of your works capture rural Eastern Oregon towns, experiences, and people. Some of my favorite poems are your character portraits in West of Paradise (1999). Experiences as simple and settled as cooking oatmeal or boating under a bridge find place in your work. You start small and local, but open to encapsulate much greater themes and experiences. What has caused your attachment to this small-town idea?
GV: Except for three years living and studying and teaching abroad, my “attachment to this small-town ideal” comes from what I know and feel and live. Boating down the Grande Ronde River, cooking oatmeal for breakfast—I’ve actually been there, done that. Also, as a writer I participate in a realistic literary tradition found in all world literatures, including American, Spanish, and Chinese. In them, I always found stories and characters and plots arising from daily life in rural settings. Without the madding crowd, small town lives become more transparent, accessible, universal. Commonplace characters or events can hold superior expressions of meaning. Setting can become a character. Think of Chekhov, Edgar Lee Masters, Juan Ramon Jimenez, McMurtry, Steinbeck—the list is endless.
WB: Even further than your preference for rural life, there’s almost a downright virulence against the industrializing impulse of man. I’m thinking of poems like “Poetry, That Bandit.” The push of man to oppress or dominate nature is a practice you firmly reject. Yet, at the same time, you live in a town, you work as a professor, your life here in La Grande is on the fringe of civilization, immersed in nature and society, both here and there, one foot in both camps. What is the proper relationship between man and the natural world?
GV: The short answer here is to say I’m a conservationist attempting to practice what Aldo Leopold called the “land ethic” in The Sand County Almanac: ”A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” (1949) Both at home on my small farm south of town and in my office at school, I have tried to translate this statement into concrete practices in daily life: walking or riding my bike to school instead of driving; growing and preserving an organic garden, planting a juniper windbreak; recycling every form of paper; composting all organic and non-organic waste; teaching Leopold’s book in my courses; testifying for wilderness preservation; organizing and opposing new dams on free-flowing streams; publishing articles and poems about land use, supporting a local food co-op organization and development; preserving natural vegetation in urban spaces, renovating and building solar-friendly houses, and so on. In brief, I try to integrate my various lives and values beyond the dualism you pointed out. Lorca’s “The Poet in New York” (1941) is my alert and warning.
WB: Speaking of people, your works often focus on members of your family and experiences with them. From Aunt Helen's Avon soaps to the comic books you read with you brother in your tree house, you’re like the family scavenger who “sees the lost family’s silence at the heart,” and your poems sometimes seem to “gather every artifact in sight.” Most of your irreligious poems center on your stepfather the Presbyterian minister. Your grandfather is everywhere in your works. Yet as I mentioned earlier, your family aren't the only characters in your writing. Many friends, students, acquaintances, and other non-family members make appearances in character portraits, eulogies, monologues. (The tenderness with which you capture some of these people’s lives suggests they could be family). Do you think a writer has a responsibility for the stories of those who cannot or do not tell their own?
GV: Yes. a writer needs to be a good listener and curator. We’re awash in a wealth of voices, some of which become memorable, so dramatic poetry interests me–the poetry of adopting personae. Also, singing and telling the stories of my family, I was encouraged to perform from a very young age. As I’ve written in more detail in “Singing the Silver Valley Cannonball,” being a singer and eventually a folksinger became an important part of my identity. To earn tuition during college, I sang in musicals, choirs, ensembles, weddings, and funerals. I began to search for and collect folk songs from my region. Eventually, I realized I was singing everyone else’s songs while my own unsung lyrics were latent and silent. That dissonance launched me as a writer who valued the writing of others. Most recently, I donated a collection of 300 folk stories to the university library here. Collected largely from students in my classes, that unpublished collection—a kind of anthology of regional folklore—had been preceded by other published collections, most notably The Oregon Literature Series (1993-1994), six historical anthologies of Oregon writers and writing.
WB: I’m really interested in your enjambment. You use it a lot. In some places, you’re very precise in your line breaks, creating conflicting or interestingly complimentary meaning from the well-placed stops. However, other places I was confused, and I found myself thinking that much of your enjambment seems very, well, arbitrary (though, it did still flow). But maybe I’m not looking hard enough for why you break lines as you do. Or maybe I shouldn’t even be looking, if you know what I mean. How do you break your lines?
GV: To generalize, I start a day by writing something, anything, then starting spontaneous successive drafting, I read, rewrite, read again, rewrite again. In that initial process, I’m not thinking about any literary technique. I just write to hear and follow the words wherever they lead, then I cool off and go on to another piece. A day or two later, I might read the draft aloud, listening and trusting the sound, other times trusting a poetic form, still others trusting intuition alone. A lot of my lineation is formed by what I call “the listener within.” This voice comes when I might think about fine tuning—enjambment or rhythm or rhyme. Sometimes reading aloud, other times reading silently, I always try to hear the voice and breath movement and the phrasing of the sentence and respond. Sometimes, a line runs, other times it crackles or crawl. There’s continuous play between white space and meaning and line endings not defined by grammar or punctuation.
WB: Many of your pieces feel very open and, well, incomplete. Some of your work—poems like “The Cagy Laureate of Oregon” and “My Friend from the Catherine Creek Heronry”—end on questions. Initially, I thought this might just be poor technique, but then I realized that these hanging words take the story or object of the poem and throw it back into the imagination of the reader, like the story about the particular character or event has just begun and it’s now up to us to use our own imagination to expand the story. There’s a level of vulnerability in this technique, trusting that your words will be enticing enough to draw people into the world and invest their imaginations, trusting enough to leave it less direct. Why open the imagination of the reader with this ambiguity in the ending?
GV: Essentially, a final question invites the reader to participate in the resolution and extension of the poem. And you’re right—that indirection is always a risk. Both poems you refer to have presented some quintessential mystery: in the heronry, the poem asks the reader if he/she wants this magnificent bird to take the reader someplace, to continue a wild liberation, while the Stafford poem invites the reader to tacitly detect the subtle nuances of his metaphorical style. So, a question may cause readers to look back at the poem again, see if they can detect those qualities. And sometimes, of course, the questions can be rhetorical–just follow the implications.
WB: Judging by your essays on northwest poetry and Nard Jones, you love research. Your creative works also show remarkable immersion in history and literature. What part does research play in your work, especially your creative work?
GV: I’m eclectic. There’s always someone’s story to save as it passes by my overhearing ears. If I read unforgettable information that seems to come off the page, I write it down. That’s what happened in “The Emperor Breeds Only on the Ice” for which I received the Northwest Writers prize. Other times, if a stranger approaches me and tells me an unforgettable story, I’ll write it down. That’s where I heard “A Hanford Veteran: Jay Mullen’s Story.” At Thanksgiving, my ancient aunt may tell me another page of family history. That’s where I found “Family Scavenger.” These are unpredictable moments. I keep track of them in various ways–diary, journal, tape recordings, notes, so I create my own archive—at least one cassette recording after every 4th of July family gathering in Alder. Unless I have a commission, as required in “The Lichen Family Story,” and “High Cascades,” I don’t typically set out to write a poem about some relevant topic based on reading or research. Only if my curiosity urges me to find something more will I follow-up in the library or on line.
WB: Let’s talk about, your new book.*
GV: Lichen Songs: New and Selected Poems(2017). It’s a collection selected from three books previously published. There are ten poems published but never collected in a book, twenty-two poems from my three earlier books, and there are eighteen new poems. So eighty poems and a bibliography that spans 1978 to the present—2017.
WB: This book covers a lot of your writing history but not from the beginning. Why did you choose to reprint those old poems?
GV: Good question. In a book like this, a writer may be trying to do three things: (1) you`re reviving the work you’ve already done because readers may not know about it; (2), your earlier books are out of print—in fact, they are; (3) you or your readers may be interested in the evolution and/or study of your work. Topics I started writing about in the 1970s are probably quite different than those I’m exploring in 2017. So, showing and examining that range and variation is good reason to put together books like this. It’s a recursive historical process. Even old typos can be fixed. Reading that body of work, I also learn if I’ve successfully avoided the contemporary bane—self-imitation.
WB: That being said, I’ve also noticed that all of your books show a reverence for the tactile elements of the northwest—your beekeeping experience with your grandfather, the birds around your house that you’re explaining to your neighbor: you have this kind of reverence for this area, this place. What is it about this place that has so captured the poetry?
GV: Good question, Will. The immediate world around us, the universe that nurtures us, the ecological systems and space we share: all of those particular dimensions of local life become possibilities for revelation. A poet is someone who enters into direct discourse with particularity in order to discover and explore the universal—whatever it might be. If I’m contemplating the birds after the blizzard of 2017, I’m engaging with those birds in a kind of survival ritual in which I can see what each one of them is doing while my neighbor, who didn’t know these birds, will have a better idea and a real grounded feeling for who is flying around, the names and songs of those birds, and what they are up to. As Gertrude Stein once said, “Poetry is a way of knowing and loving in names.” By naming the birds, I interiorize them, give them presence. I can share that identification with neighbors and friends (I sent that poem out to everyone for Christmas card—one told me they taped it to their refrigerator.)
WB: So, in a sense, there’s an honor being done to a person, place, or thing by giving it a name.
GV: Yes. Since Adam in the Garden, naming becomes a critical practice for anyone who’s serious about language and about poetry in particular. The overall problem we all face: we may not have any connection to the universe without language. As a poet once wrote, “Nothing remains unless touched by language.” Wallace Stegner once wrote, “You don’t have a place until you have a poet for it.” Those are the kinds of revelations in commentary and language that enfranchise and achieve identity. Instead of wandering in a nameless world without relationships, history, or myth, you walk through the world discovering, realizing, celebrating, and exploring the amazing particularity around us. Everything becomes possibility, becomes potential enhancement of your or anyone’s experience.
WB: So as a poet of the northwest, you’re not just capturing the northwest–you’re actually creating a northwest identity by writing about it.
GV: I agree. There’s a sense of identity that comes from what and where you live and observe and value and record and try to interpret. That place or person or thing or image or idea might lead you outside your self. Those discoveries become essential to the nature of what I have called sacred or profane space, the elemental dialogue of spiritual geography. In fact, that’s an approximation of the title of my book that won the Oregon Book Award: Marking the Magic Circle: An Intimate Geography (1987). When you look around, you understand. The poems give you the ability to concentrate on what’s before you and its identity and cycles—like watching a creek, watching a river, wondering if that’s the same water that was there last year this time or not. You become aware of salmon and their crisis and Native Americans and their identity and all of the issues that are associated with natural resource conservation become critical to everyone’s understanding of where they are so they don’t become—shall I say—a lost and rootless wanderer in a landscape that is nowhere. You get a sense of clear identity and that empowers you to see and do all kinds of impossible and possible things.
WB: So this is a book in a long string of books you’ve written leading up to this one. Looking back on the books you’ve written, is there something that makes this book stand out?
GV: I suppose that this book documents the evolution of my writing poetry, just as my personal prose is documented in Keeping the Swarm (2012) and Beaver’s Fire (2016) collects a sheaf of my critical writing. I have not yet gathered what might be called “collected poems” where everything would be winnowed for posterity. In this present collection I can recognize the trajectory of my experience as a writer and poet. I can look at the poems that didn’t get published, and I can look at the poems that did get published and have confidence in the judgments of the two poets who waded through the several hundred poems that make up the body of my work—Paulann Peterson and John Witte. I could trust them when they said, “Publish this one, don’t publish that one.” Working independently, they both judged everything, sent me their final ratings: yes, no, maybe. There was a lot of agreement and a lot to leave out. So this book is distinguished by and enjoys the objectivity and selectivity of a professional editorial process. I have been given a better book from judgments not solely my own.
WB: So it’s a kind of summation, in a way?
GV: In a way, although partial because it’s “selected” rather than “collected.”
WB: So if somebody wanted to read a George Venn book, this would be an ideal book for them to read because the first three books are sampled.
GV: Fifty of the eighty poems are from other books, and most people have no idea what those three books contain. If I ask, “Will, have you read Off the Main Road (1978), Marking the Magic Circle (1987), and West of Paradise (1999), my guess is you’d probably have to say “No” because they aren’t easy to find unless you go to the library, and there are some copies you can still buy, but for the most part, this collection gives you a taste of what I’ve been doing for thirty years.
WB: Cool. That’s a nice thing to have for people who aren’t familiar with your work. So, what’s next? What are you working on?
GV: I drafted a novel in 1987-88 that I haven’t yet gone back to in order to see if I know more about revision than I did forty years ago. It’s a 300 page draft and it probably needs to be half that long, so one of the problems I’ll face when I go back to that is how to compress it, to make it more dramatic that perhaps it is now. Another project which I inherited directly or indirectly: when my mother passed away, she left all her papers to me. She was a terrific note taker and diarist on occasions, There’s a lot of information in her handwriting and typed scripts that would probably make a biography, so I’ve been deciding whether or not I should take that on, and bring that to fruition as either a biography or autobiography. There’s enough information to support either one. The question for me will be voice: which will be the more enabling voice for that kind of manuscript? I also have some forty works of short fiction that I wrote while I was teaching. Some of those have been published but most of them haven’t. So I’ve been thinking I should try to find a willing and able editor who will read all of those pieces and see if there’s a book there.
I haven’t been writing fiction these days, although I could go back to that relatively easily. So there’s three possible projects—two in typed manuscript form already and one that’s scattered in the chaos of my mom’s papers. She had a very complicated life; she was married three times and outlived all of her husbands. Two of them were Presbyterian ministers. She always has a quasi religious audience to consider, so propriety and self-censorship can get in the way when she’s going to say something.
WB: Last question: a lot of people who watch TV are not readers of poetry or readers in general. What would you say to someone to encourage them to pick up a book—yours or someone else’s?
GV: A short and easy and direct answer might be, “Get ready. You’re going to be enriched. Much has happened where you live. Other people have had strong feelings about where you live and love. What you see around you every day—weather or people or jobs or rivers or mountains—whatever it might be—a good book or a poem may give you a perspective that is somewhat different than the one you have."
WB: So, are you saying that the language of the poet might enhance a reader’s ability or desire to understand themselves and the Grande Ronde Valley?
GV: If the poem is working—yes. The reader might discover something new, a different insight into what it means to live in a mountain valley in the interior of Oregon. The place is remote and complex. The wildlife outnumber the people. Thousands of beautiful wild places, lives still unknown. Thirty three creeks flow into the meandering river basin. What are their names? Is this place a cradle or a prison? There’s all kinds of discovery waiting for the reader, discovery you can’t always make anyplace else.
WB: So why does poetry leave me scratching my head and wondering what the fart they’re talking about? Sometimes, it all seems so pretentious.
GV: Will, as a reader, you’re on a journey of discovery. That can be difficult. Just turn the page. Keep going. So, thank you for inviting me to do this. I hope I answered your questions.
WB: It was great! If anyone’s interested in purchasing Lichen Songs or any of George’s other books, they can be purchased directly from George or from his website: www.georgevenn.com.
GV: Place became important to me while growing up, partly because I lived in five different towns before I finished the eighth grade. During those years of moving town to town for schooling, the one stable center was my grandparents’ rural farm in Alder. From infancy to marriage I lived every summer with them and always intuitively felt their farm was my home. During those boyhood summers, place also became significant in another way: I worked with my grandfather, a migratory beekeeper, who taught me the significance of a good location: honey bees flourished with fields of bloom, gathered tons of nectar, made a living, gave us a harvest to take home. Always moving between town and country also heightened my awareness of different places, cultivated my intuitive awareness of place. If I’m writing, place can become literal or metaphoric, symbolic or allegorical–a place to stand, a hellhole, a paradise, a glass mountain. Also, memorizing the King James Bible introduced me to lots of mythic places. If I don’t know where to begin, places speak to me and I start to listen. I’m grounded, As Stegner once said, “You can’t high jump from a pan of jello.”
WB: Speaking of place, many of your works capture rural Eastern Oregon towns, experiences, and people. Some of my favorite poems are your character portraits in West of Paradise (1999). Experiences as simple and settled as cooking oatmeal or boating under a bridge find place in your work. You start small and local, but open to encapsulate much greater themes and experiences. What has caused your attachment to this small-town idea?
GV: Except for three years living and studying and teaching abroad, my “attachment to this small-town ideal” comes from what I know and feel and live. Boating down the Grande Ronde River, cooking oatmeal for breakfast—I’ve actually been there, done that. Also, as a writer I participate in a realistic literary tradition found in all world literatures, including American, Spanish, and Chinese. In them, I always found stories and characters and plots arising from daily life in rural settings. Without the madding crowd, small town lives become more transparent, accessible, universal. Commonplace characters or events can hold superior expressions of meaning. Setting can become a character. Think of Chekhov, Edgar Lee Masters, Juan Ramon Jimenez, McMurtry, Steinbeck—the list is endless.
WB: Even further than your preference for rural life, there’s almost a downright virulence against the industrializing impulse of man. I’m thinking of poems like “Poetry, That Bandit.” The push of man to oppress or dominate nature is a practice you firmly reject. Yet, at the same time, you live in a town, you work as a professor, your life here in La Grande is on the fringe of civilization, immersed in nature and society, both here and there, one foot in both camps. What is the proper relationship between man and the natural world?
GV: The short answer here is to say I’m a conservationist attempting to practice what Aldo Leopold called the “land ethic” in The Sand County Almanac: ”A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” (1949) Both at home on my small farm south of town and in my office at school, I have tried to translate this statement into concrete practices in daily life: walking or riding my bike to school instead of driving; growing and preserving an organic garden, planting a juniper windbreak; recycling every form of paper; composting all organic and non-organic waste; teaching Leopold’s book in my courses; testifying for wilderness preservation; organizing and opposing new dams on free-flowing streams; publishing articles and poems about land use, supporting a local food co-op organization and development; preserving natural vegetation in urban spaces, renovating and building solar-friendly houses, and so on. In brief, I try to integrate my various lives and values beyond the dualism you pointed out. Lorca’s “The Poet in New York” (1941) is my alert and warning.
WB: Speaking of people, your works often focus on members of your family and experiences with them. From Aunt Helen's Avon soaps to the comic books you read with you brother in your tree house, you’re like the family scavenger who “sees the lost family’s silence at the heart,” and your poems sometimes seem to “gather every artifact in sight.” Most of your irreligious poems center on your stepfather the Presbyterian minister. Your grandfather is everywhere in your works. Yet as I mentioned earlier, your family aren't the only characters in your writing. Many friends, students, acquaintances, and other non-family members make appearances in character portraits, eulogies, monologues. (The tenderness with which you capture some of these people’s lives suggests they could be family). Do you think a writer has a responsibility for the stories of those who cannot or do not tell their own?
GV: Yes. a writer needs to be a good listener and curator. We’re awash in a wealth of voices, some of which become memorable, so dramatic poetry interests me–the poetry of adopting personae. Also, singing and telling the stories of my family, I was encouraged to perform from a very young age. As I’ve written in more detail in “Singing the Silver Valley Cannonball,” being a singer and eventually a folksinger became an important part of my identity. To earn tuition during college, I sang in musicals, choirs, ensembles, weddings, and funerals. I began to search for and collect folk songs from my region. Eventually, I realized I was singing everyone else’s songs while my own unsung lyrics were latent and silent. That dissonance launched me as a writer who valued the writing of others. Most recently, I donated a collection of 300 folk stories to the university library here. Collected largely from students in my classes, that unpublished collection—a kind of anthology of regional folklore—had been preceded by other published collections, most notably The Oregon Literature Series (1993-1994), six historical anthologies of Oregon writers and writing.
WB: I’m really interested in your enjambment. You use it a lot. In some places, you’re very precise in your line breaks, creating conflicting or interestingly complimentary meaning from the well-placed stops. However, other places I was confused, and I found myself thinking that much of your enjambment seems very, well, arbitrary (though, it did still flow). But maybe I’m not looking hard enough for why you break lines as you do. Or maybe I shouldn’t even be looking, if you know what I mean. How do you break your lines?
GV: To generalize, I start a day by writing something, anything, then starting spontaneous successive drafting, I read, rewrite, read again, rewrite again. In that initial process, I’m not thinking about any literary technique. I just write to hear and follow the words wherever they lead, then I cool off and go on to another piece. A day or two later, I might read the draft aloud, listening and trusting the sound, other times trusting a poetic form, still others trusting intuition alone. A lot of my lineation is formed by what I call “the listener within.” This voice comes when I might think about fine tuning—enjambment or rhythm or rhyme. Sometimes reading aloud, other times reading silently, I always try to hear the voice and breath movement and the phrasing of the sentence and respond. Sometimes, a line runs, other times it crackles or crawl. There’s continuous play between white space and meaning and line endings not defined by grammar or punctuation.
WB: Many of your pieces feel very open and, well, incomplete. Some of your work—poems like “The Cagy Laureate of Oregon” and “My Friend from the Catherine Creek Heronry”—end on questions. Initially, I thought this might just be poor technique, but then I realized that these hanging words take the story or object of the poem and throw it back into the imagination of the reader, like the story about the particular character or event has just begun and it’s now up to us to use our own imagination to expand the story. There’s a level of vulnerability in this technique, trusting that your words will be enticing enough to draw people into the world and invest their imaginations, trusting enough to leave it less direct. Why open the imagination of the reader with this ambiguity in the ending?
GV: Essentially, a final question invites the reader to participate in the resolution and extension of the poem. And you’re right—that indirection is always a risk. Both poems you refer to have presented some quintessential mystery: in the heronry, the poem asks the reader if he/she wants this magnificent bird to take the reader someplace, to continue a wild liberation, while the Stafford poem invites the reader to tacitly detect the subtle nuances of his metaphorical style. So, a question may cause readers to look back at the poem again, see if they can detect those qualities. And sometimes, of course, the questions can be rhetorical–just follow the implications.
WB: Judging by your essays on northwest poetry and Nard Jones, you love research. Your creative works also show remarkable immersion in history and literature. What part does research play in your work, especially your creative work?
GV: I’m eclectic. There’s always someone’s story to save as it passes by my overhearing ears. If I read unforgettable information that seems to come off the page, I write it down. That’s what happened in “The Emperor Breeds Only on the Ice” for which I received the Northwest Writers prize. Other times, if a stranger approaches me and tells me an unforgettable story, I’ll write it down. That’s where I heard “A Hanford Veteran: Jay Mullen’s Story.” At Thanksgiving, my ancient aunt may tell me another page of family history. That’s where I found “Family Scavenger.” These are unpredictable moments. I keep track of them in various ways–diary, journal, tape recordings, notes, so I create my own archive—at least one cassette recording after every 4th of July family gathering in Alder. Unless I have a commission, as required in “The Lichen Family Story,” and “High Cascades,” I don’t typically set out to write a poem about some relevant topic based on reading or research. Only if my curiosity urges me to find something more will I follow-up in the library or on line.
WB: Let’s talk about, your new book.*
GV: Lichen Songs: New and Selected Poems(2017). It’s a collection selected from three books previously published. There are ten poems published but never collected in a book, twenty-two poems from my three earlier books, and there are eighteen new poems. So eighty poems and a bibliography that spans 1978 to the present—2017.
WB: This book covers a lot of your writing history but not from the beginning. Why did you choose to reprint those old poems?
GV: Good question. In a book like this, a writer may be trying to do three things: (1) you`re reviving the work you’ve already done because readers may not know about it; (2), your earlier books are out of print—in fact, they are; (3) you or your readers may be interested in the evolution and/or study of your work. Topics I started writing about in the 1970s are probably quite different than those I’m exploring in 2017. So, showing and examining that range and variation is good reason to put together books like this. It’s a recursive historical process. Even old typos can be fixed. Reading that body of work, I also learn if I’ve successfully avoided the contemporary bane—self-imitation.
WB: That being said, I’ve also noticed that all of your books show a reverence for the tactile elements of the northwest—your beekeeping experience with your grandfather, the birds around your house that you’re explaining to your neighbor: you have this kind of reverence for this area, this place. What is it about this place that has so captured the poetry?
GV: Good question, Will. The immediate world around us, the universe that nurtures us, the ecological systems and space we share: all of those particular dimensions of local life become possibilities for revelation. A poet is someone who enters into direct discourse with particularity in order to discover and explore the universal—whatever it might be. If I’m contemplating the birds after the blizzard of 2017, I’m engaging with those birds in a kind of survival ritual in which I can see what each one of them is doing while my neighbor, who didn’t know these birds, will have a better idea and a real grounded feeling for who is flying around, the names and songs of those birds, and what they are up to. As Gertrude Stein once said, “Poetry is a way of knowing and loving in names.” By naming the birds, I interiorize them, give them presence. I can share that identification with neighbors and friends (I sent that poem out to everyone for Christmas card—one told me they taped it to their refrigerator.)
WB: So, in a sense, there’s an honor being done to a person, place, or thing by giving it a name.
GV: Yes. Since Adam in the Garden, naming becomes a critical practice for anyone who’s serious about language and about poetry in particular. The overall problem we all face: we may not have any connection to the universe without language. As a poet once wrote, “Nothing remains unless touched by language.” Wallace Stegner once wrote, “You don’t have a place until you have a poet for it.” Those are the kinds of revelations in commentary and language that enfranchise and achieve identity. Instead of wandering in a nameless world without relationships, history, or myth, you walk through the world discovering, realizing, celebrating, and exploring the amazing particularity around us. Everything becomes possibility, becomes potential enhancement of your or anyone’s experience.
WB: So as a poet of the northwest, you’re not just capturing the northwest–you’re actually creating a northwest identity by writing about it.
GV: I agree. There’s a sense of identity that comes from what and where you live and observe and value and record and try to interpret. That place or person or thing or image or idea might lead you outside your self. Those discoveries become essential to the nature of what I have called sacred or profane space, the elemental dialogue of spiritual geography. In fact, that’s an approximation of the title of my book that won the Oregon Book Award: Marking the Magic Circle: An Intimate Geography (1987). When you look around, you understand. The poems give you the ability to concentrate on what’s before you and its identity and cycles—like watching a creek, watching a river, wondering if that’s the same water that was there last year this time or not. You become aware of salmon and their crisis and Native Americans and their identity and all of the issues that are associated with natural resource conservation become critical to everyone’s understanding of where they are so they don’t become—shall I say—a lost and rootless wanderer in a landscape that is nowhere. You get a sense of clear identity and that empowers you to see and do all kinds of impossible and possible things.
WB: So this is a book in a long string of books you’ve written leading up to this one. Looking back on the books you’ve written, is there something that makes this book stand out?
GV: I suppose that this book documents the evolution of my writing poetry, just as my personal prose is documented in Keeping the Swarm (2012) and Beaver’s Fire (2016) collects a sheaf of my critical writing. I have not yet gathered what might be called “collected poems” where everything would be winnowed for posterity. In this present collection I can recognize the trajectory of my experience as a writer and poet. I can look at the poems that didn’t get published, and I can look at the poems that did get published and have confidence in the judgments of the two poets who waded through the several hundred poems that make up the body of my work—Paulann Peterson and John Witte. I could trust them when they said, “Publish this one, don’t publish that one.” Working independently, they both judged everything, sent me their final ratings: yes, no, maybe. There was a lot of agreement and a lot to leave out. So this book is distinguished by and enjoys the objectivity and selectivity of a professional editorial process. I have been given a better book from judgments not solely my own.
WB: So it’s a kind of summation, in a way?
GV: In a way, although partial because it’s “selected” rather than “collected.”
WB: So if somebody wanted to read a George Venn book, this would be an ideal book for them to read because the first three books are sampled.
GV: Fifty of the eighty poems are from other books, and most people have no idea what those three books contain. If I ask, “Will, have you read Off the Main Road (1978), Marking the Magic Circle (1987), and West of Paradise (1999), my guess is you’d probably have to say “No” because they aren’t easy to find unless you go to the library, and there are some copies you can still buy, but for the most part, this collection gives you a taste of what I’ve been doing for thirty years.
WB: Cool. That’s a nice thing to have for people who aren’t familiar with your work. So, what’s next? What are you working on?
GV: I drafted a novel in 1987-88 that I haven’t yet gone back to in order to see if I know more about revision than I did forty years ago. It’s a 300 page draft and it probably needs to be half that long, so one of the problems I’ll face when I go back to that is how to compress it, to make it more dramatic that perhaps it is now. Another project which I inherited directly or indirectly: when my mother passed away, she left all her papers to me. She was a terrific note taker and diarist on occasions, There’s a lot of information in her handwriting and typed scripts that would probably make a biography, so I’ve been deciding whether or not I should take that on, and bring that to fruition as either a biography or autobiography. There’s enough information to support either one. The question for me will be voice: which will be the more enabling voice for that kind of manuscript? I also have some forty works of short fiction that I wrote while I was teaching. Some of those have been published but most of them haven’t. So I’ve been thinking I should try to find a willing and able editor who will read all of those pieces and see if there’s a book there.
I haven’t been writing fiction these days, although I could go back to that relatively easily. So there’s three possible projects—two in typed manuscript form already and one that’s scattered in the chaos of my mom’s papers. She had a very complicated life; she was married three times and outlived all of her husbands. Two of them were Presbyterian ministers. She always has a quasi religious audience to consider, so propriety and self-censorship can get in the way when she’s going to say something.
WB: Last question: a lot of people who watch TV are not readers of poetry or readers in general. What would you say to someone to encourage them to pick up a book—yours or someone else’s?
GV: A short and easy and direct answer might be, “Get ready. You’re going to be enriched. Much has happened where you live. Other people have had strong feelings about where you live and love. What you see around you every day—weather or people or jobs or rivers or mountains—whatever it might be—a good book or a poem may give you a perspective that is somewhat different than the one you have."
WB: So, are you saying that the language of the poet might enhance a reader’s ability or desire to understand themselves and the Grande Ronde Valley?
GV: If the poem is working—yes. The reader might discover something new, a different insight into what it means to live in a mountain valley in the interior of Oregon. The place is remote and complex. The wildlife outnumber the people. Thousands of beautiful wild places, lives still unknown. Thirty three creeks flow into the meandering river basin. What are their names? Is this place a cradle or a prison? There’s all kinds of discovery waiting for the reader, discovery you can’t always make anyplace else.
WB: So why does poetry leave me scratching my head and wondering what the fart they’re talking about? Sometimes, it all seems so pretentious.
GV: Will, as a reader, you’re on a journey of discovery. That can be difficult. Just turn the page. Keep going. So, thank you for inviting me to do this. I hope I answered your questions.
WB: It was great! If anyone’s interested in purchasing Lichen Songs or any of George’s other books, they can be purchased directly from George or from his website: www.georgevenn.com.