I would like to make more people aware of poetry.
I would
like poetry to change people's lives.
--
Elise Paschen
Elise Paschen
One of the most energetic and complex figures on the contemporary poetry scene, Elise Paschen, Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America, is helping to chart new frontiers for verse. With her colleague, eminent poet Molly Peacock, Paschen has made strides towards placing our national poetry into the mainstream of American life with the "Poetry in Motion" project, a collaborative venture between the PSA and public transportation systems nationwide to literally paper the walls of buses and subways with poems.
A poet in her own right, Paschen is the author of HOUSES: COASTS (Sycamore Press, Oxford, England, 1985), a limited edition chapbook. In 1996, she received the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize for her first book of verse, INFIDELITIES (StoryLine Press). Pashen also won the Garrison Medal and the Untermyer Poetry Prize as an undergraduate at Harvard; and the Selig Poetry Prize at Oxford, where she completed a PhD on W.B. Yeats.
Paschen--the only child of Chicago businessman, Henry Paschen and prima ballerina, Maria Tallchief (called "the fire bird")--writes poems which weave gossamer threads between movement and stasis, home and exile, dreams and reality. Her original voice--at times emotional, always truthful--tells the stories of her extraordinary life. In this interview, ELF asks Pashen to tell us even more about the sensitive poet and the extraordinary administrator.---GGB
GGB: You've said that you never intended to go into business yet now find yourself in the business of poetry. How is the business of poetry these days?
EP: It's a very exciting time for poetry. I think the literary arts in general have been experiencing a renaissance over the past ten years. Wežre on the crest of the wave and itžs still gathering momentum!
GGB: What was your biggest motivation for taking on this very demanding career? And what is your biggest motivation in continuing?
EP: I never intended to become an arts administrator, but I always intended to devote my life to poetry. I had been the Poetry Editor at the "Harvard Advocate" and an editor and co- founder of "Oxford Poetry." After finishing my doctoral dissertation at Oxford, I moved to New York City in hopes of finding another job as a poetry editor. By lucky coincidence, the previous director of the PSA, Judith Baumel, was contemplating leaving to take a job in academia. Bill Matthews, who was president at the time, interviewed me and hired me as Executive Director in 1988. My motivation has evolved. The first challenge was simply finding a job in the poetry world. Little did I know that I would absolutely adore my job. Now my mission is for the PSA to put poetry at the crossroads of American life.
GGB: And, under your direction, the organization has indeed taken a leading role in bringing poetry to common readers, particularly with the "Poetry in Motion" project. Tell me about its mission and the concept behind it. What kind of a response has it received?
EP: We launched the program in 1992 in collaboration with NYC Transit. It was inspired by a similar program in London called "Poems on the Underground." In the PSA's 87-year history no program has ignited the publicžs imagination as much as "Poetry in Motion." In New York, the PSA and New York City Transit receives over 30 phone calls or letters a week praising it. We are overwhelmed with the publicžs response. It has far exceeded our expectations. I remember that, during my hiring interview, Bill Matthews said, "Wežre called the Poetry Society of America, but we really are a New York organization." My first objective was to make the PSA a national organization with events across the country. We began to accomplish this in 1990 with funding from the Lila Wallace Readeržs Digest Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts. But "Poetry in Motion" was the turning point. With that program, we were able to bring poetry into the publicžs awareness. Now the program is running in New York, Chicago, Portland, and Baltimore, and we plan to extend it to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Washington, DC, Miami, and, if possible, every city across the country!
GGB: So now that "Poetry in Motion" is expanding nationally and a big New York publishing house has turned the project into a book, can film-rights be far behind? Should mass media pay more attention to poetry?
EP: Yes! I also hope that more poets and poems inspire future films. It is astounding to see how much a movie may affect the sale of poetry. Because of "Four Weddings and a Funeral," for example, Audenžs "Selected Poems" became a bestseller in England!
GGB: When you go out to speak to arts organizations, what is the one message you try to communicate about poetry today and the PSA's role in keeping the art both lively and alive?
EP: I often feel as if I am a poetry ambassador or, at times, a poetry missionary. I attempt to convert the unconverted. That is what is so exciting about working on "Poetry in Motion." We make poetry accessible to the masses by offering a sampling of poems from different countries, cultures, aesthetic schools, and historical periods--from Sappho to Gwendolyn Brooks. I frequently quote responses wežve received from subway and bus riders: "That poem changed my life" or "It helped me see the world through new eyes." I would like to make more people aware of poetry. I would like poetry to change people's lives.
GGB: You have shown an exceptional talent for drawing benefactors and lovers of the art of poetry to your events. You've broadened PSA membership as well.
EP: Being an arts administrator has opened my heart to all poets and poetries. I had a very elitist education: Harvard and Oxford. My area of expertise was 20th Century English Literature--the Modernist poets, Eliot, Pound, Auden. I studied James Joyce with Richard Ellman. I had very high expectations for what a poem should be. And I still do. But I feel my job at the Poetry Society has allowed me to add breadth to my knowledge, as well as depth. In building the PSA and in co-editing the "Poetry in Motion" anthology, Molly Peacock (the past president) and I have taken great pride in molding the PSA into a grass-roots organization ž opening the PSA to all members, all constituents. In choosing judges, planning programs, selecting poems for the anthology, we strive to discover the best poets and poems, from all schoolsžlanguage or formalist--and all cultures, all styles ž from hip hop to narrative. We attempt to cast a wide net to all poetry constituents while maintaining a high level of excellence. I appreciate the poets whose lives are involved in academics (and I personally miss the ivory tower ž the Bodleian Library at Oxford!) but I do feel that the public shouldnžt be intimidated by poetry. When we choose the poems to appear on the buses and subways, we are trying to find those poems that make your heart stop, but also ones you can delve into, in which you may discover something new and explore new dimensions.
GGB: How do you balance the roles of arts administrator and writer?
EP: It's difficult. I love both "jobs"--and sometimes it's tough going back and forth between the two. When I first began working for the PSA, I put my poems on the back burner. Two Board members (Molly and Dana Gioia, now both dear friends), urged me to keep writing. That was, after all, why I had become involved in the organization in the first place. Molly reminded me that while we were indeed creating fantastic poetry programs across the country, at the end of our lives, poets want to look back and be proud of the poems we've written. So I was very grateful to Molly when, several years into the job, she urged me to switch to a four day work week. This was partly a way to compensate for our modest salaries. But thanks to weekends and those Wednesdays at home, I've been able to devote more energy to my own work and eventually to produce my book.
GGB: Which naturally leads us to talking about INFIDELITIES (Story Line Press, 1996), which won the prestigious Nicholas Roerich prize. The poems themselves span a fifteen-year period. When did you decide to organize the poems into book form?
EP: I had always concentrated on writing poems, rather than working on a manuscript. In 1985, John Fuller, poet and founder of Sycamore Press, said he wished to publish my poems as a chapbook, which we then called "Houses: Coasts." Around that time James Fenton, whose brother, Tom, ran Salamander Press, had mentioned to me that if I ever did have a full-length book of poems, I should submit it to Salamander. I was thrilled, as I was a fan of Fentonžs and of the Salamander Press. So that was inspiring. But I kept writing individual poems and didnžt think about a manuscript. Things changed after I moved to New York. I started arranging my poems into a collection in the early nineties. The problem was that I envisioned the book as a "selection" and I arranged the work chronologically: there were the ones I wrote at Harvard, those from the "Oxford" years and then my poems in New York. These stages of my writing life were stylistically different.
GGB: You've said that Frank Bidart played an influential role in helping you shape the book. What lessons did you learn from him?
EP: Yes, Frank Bidart played a vital part. He urged me to look at the work differently. He helped me spot recurring themes and threads, suggesting ways we could interweave motifs. He was a tough taskmaster. Poems in the manuscript had been published in "The New Yorker," "The Nation," "The New Republic," "Poetry," yet he would find something to tweak or pinch a bit. I would say, "But, Frank, these poems have already been published!" He would iterate that the poems were now a part of a larger collection and had to work within that greater whole. These werenžt major changes: a comma here, a word there. Frank is a brilliant teacher because he doesnžt impose a Frank Bidart poem on your poem. He helps you identify what is in your poem that you perhaps did not recognize. The same thing with the manuscript: he allowed me to understand the larger narrative structure at work. He challenged me to write new poems, to flesh out the larger narrative "story" of the book. He was also strict in what we excluded from the book. Several previously published poems did not make the cut because they did not fit into the narrative structure. Most importantly, Frank taught me about narrative. This past year I have been travelling throughout the country, giving readings, and I am still discovering the truth in many of the suggestions he had made!
GGB: How did you know when the manuscript was ready to send out into the world?
EP: I remember the day it happened. I was preparing to leave for Annaghmakerrig, a writersž retreat in Ireland, and I received a message on my answering machine from Frank: "The book is ready! You can send it out!" Before I left the country, I submitted INFIDELITIES to various first-book contests. A week before Christmas, Robert McDowell, the publisher of Story Line Press, called and said I had won the Roerich Prize. I had an out-of-body experience: I felt like my head had shot through the ceiling, my arms and hands and feet out of the windows and doors--like Alice in Wonderland!
GGB: What roles have your other poetry teachers and mentors--among them Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Laureate--played?
EP: I have been blessed with mentors and teachers since I first began writing. (I wrote my first poem when I was eight and it was published in our school's literary magazine!) I had wonderful high school English teachers who spurred me on. One in particular, Bill Duffy, introduced me to William Butler Yeats. Ižve had a love affair (and probably even marriage) with Yeats ever since. In 1978, I studied with Seamus Heaney at Harvard. He was a delight. I still remember some of the exercises he gave us: write an aubade, a litany, an ars poetica. He even asked us to translate a canto of "The Inferno" in terza rima. Seamus made me understand the necessity of revision. As a sophomore you donžt believe anything you write needs to be revised. (Or, at least, I didnžt.) He suggested I go to Houghton Library and look at Yeatsžs manuscripts. I had the chance to study Yeatsžs extensive revisions: how poems transformed from first draft to final version. This made me alter my own writing habits. What's more, I became so obsessed with Yeats's manuscripts I wrote my doctoral dissertation on his revisions of his female persona poems. At Harvard, I also studied with Robert Fitzgerald in whose "Versification" class we retraced the entire history of English prosody. He taught me the necessity of formal control in poetry. Richard Tillinghast was another inspiring teacher in college who introduced me to the work of contemporary poets.
GGB: In A FORMAL FEELING COMES (Story Line Press, 1996, ed. Annie Finch), you have an essay describing how you write poems "inside out." What exactly do you mean by this?
EP: I believe that when you begin writing you must apprentice yourself to the trade. You need to master the forms, practice the exercises, like learning and practicing scales on a piano. I practiced my poetry "scales" by writing poems from the 'outside in.' I would choose a form first and then stumble upon discoveries within formal perimeters. But now when I write a poem, I discover the form as I write: from the "inside out." The first draft may happen quickly. I then try to recognize the poemžs configuration, its meter or rhythm, and attempt to give the poem voice and shape. What intrigues and fascinates me is how complex a creature a poem can be. The content, the emotion, the images will leap up at you, but the subliminal formal elements are at work in the background. The poet has so many techniques at hand. For example, a poet is sensitive to the letters he or she uses: the consonants and the vowels. And the sounds, the internal rhymes, the echoes. When you read metrical verse, each syllable stakes its territory. Where is it pitched? Stressed or unstressed? What effect will short lines have? And longer? Or variances in the shape and length of the stanza. There are all the wonderful choices with end words: rhymes? no rhymes? slant rhymes? refrains? The poet may even play with the beginning lines of stanzas, as in acrostics or alphabet poems. I love taking poems apart in order to see how the poet assembled them. It is almost like a mathematical equation. But the real challenge is to combine the formal mastery with the emotional intensity. Many times I read formal poems which are intricately constructed but dry and lacking in gut emotion.
GGB: INFIDELITIES is filled with emotion. The poems revolve tightly around themes of mutability, instability and ambiguity. Obviously, there is something about inconstancy and motion which fascinates and obsesses you. (Perhaps it is not pure coincidence that a poet so deeply concerned with the movements of the human heart also directs a program to put poetry in moving vehicles?) So, if dance is poetry in motion, is the reverse perhaps true for you--that poetry is your form of dance?
EP: Paul Valery once said, "Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking." As you know, dancing is in my veins, and I grew up surrounded by classical ballet and music. I grasped the discipline it took to become a great prima ballerina. Writing poetry, too, demands that discipline. You need to master the art form and yet make it appear effortless on the page. I also love the process of writing a poem. Nothing (almost) gives me greater happiness. So, for me, writing a poem is joy; hours will go by yet they will seem like moments. Poetry vanquishes time. Although I have a doctoral dissertation under my belt, I still feel that prose is like walking. I prefer to dance! I've observed an interesting interplay in literary history between poets and dancers. Many poets were inspired by the image of the dancer. It is the notion of the object versus the subject. I wanted to turn around that notion in my book and allow my women to speak. At my request, Robert McDowell let me choose the book cover. During a visit to the Metropolitan Museum the year before, I was struck by the painting "Repose," by John White Alexander. I researched it and discovered that the model was Loie Fuller, a dancer who had inspired both Mallarme and Yeats. I envision her as the guiding muse of INFIDELITIES.
GGB: Understandably, having a mother who is a prima ballerina and one of the cultural icons of our age must present challenges both inspiring and highly daunting. You seem partly to have met that challenge by writing about her. One of the most beautiful and moving lines in your book comes from "The Other Mother,"
"Because she is my mother, every night
she turns into Cinderella. In the wings
I watch. A dove balances on each shoulder."
The play of the daughter in the "wings" watching "doves" balanced on her mother's shoulders is achingly tender. Have you now, as an accomplished artist in your own right, stepped out from the wings?
EP: When you choose the life of a writer, you choose to stand in the wings and watch. On the other hand, with the publication of INFIDELITIES, I've enjoyed taking the book on the road and giving readings. In those instances, I love the chance to take center stage! (Just as long as I give myself enough time to retreat to the wings.)
GGB: Many of your poems are obsessed with houses and homes-- their absence, their instability, and the homes we make beneath our skin. For example, your poem "Confederacy" begins:
Wear the heart like a home
as in Patsy Cline's song,
what we're two-stepping to....
The narrator goes on to say,
Commandeering my moves,
he inquires, "Where's your home?"
I confuse 'home' for 'heart'...
In "12 East Scott Street," a poem about moving back to your father's house with your mother, you first write of home in concrete terms:
This is the only place that smells
like home...
and, later in the poem, identify home more metaphysically:
Home is my mother. Home is mother
with airplane smell on all her clothes....
Your parents separated for a time, and you traveled with your mother when she toured. Did the displacements of your youth leave you with an abiding fascination for a sense of home?
EP: I have a Scarlett O'Hara/Tara-like obsession with "the land," the ancestral home, history, continuity. I should have been born to an old WASP New England family with a farm house that has been passed on generation after generation. We actually do have an "ancestral" home on my motheržs side--the house where she grew up in Fairfax, Oklahoma. My Scots Irish grandmother married my Osage American Indian grandfather and initially raised her children in that house. After my grandmother died, in the early eighties, I urged my family not to sell the house. Maybe Ižll try to persuade my husband to move there with me one day. That part of my familyžs history fascinates me. But I think I will always be restlessly searching for my true home.
GGB: Another recurring figure in your work is a man with a gun who threatens to kill you. He appears in your dreams during times when you feel most vulnerable. Since you also have a poem titled "My Father's Gun," the reader may draw certain conclusions about the gunman's identity. Can you speak a little to this enigmatic gunman?
EP: As Emily Dickinson wrote: "Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant." But, to tell the truth, I actually have had a recurring night terror that started when I first started sending poems out after I had moved back from England. The dream is of a man with a gun standing beside my bed. I walk (or run) in my sleep in an attempt to escape him and have often discovered myself awake in various places in my apartment. I've always fed off my unconscious as a source for poems. I wrote down my dreams even when I was a child. And Ižve always had a vivid dream life. The poem "Adultery at the Ritz" is based on a dream where I played a gangsteržs moll in an old thirties film. (I actually got shot in that dream, and she gets shot in the poem!) The gunman fascinates and terrifies me and continues to elude me. I hope that in the book, though, his role becomes more obvious.
GGB: Speaking of Emily Dickinson, you quoted her famous line, "After great pain a formal feeling comes" in your essay for Finch's anthology. Certainly your poems are full of pain and vulnerability, emotions which some people believe are the unique domain of free verse--as if strong feeling is too messy to arrange in neat lines. Your work proves that passion and form can work harmoniously. Does the formal feeling relieve the pain or mask it?
EP: When I write a poem I attempt to tap into some heart-felt emotion--whether it's anger, betrayal, anguish, yearning or something else. Whatever happens to the poem during the course of its evolution, I hope that the initial emotion remains embedded. I try to root my poems in personal experience, or else I attempt to take a leap from that experience and enter a realm of the imagination. I prefer those works which arise from personal experiences but go off in other directions (as in my poems "Mobile" and "Salvage"). Frank Bidart suggested I write "childhood infidelity" poems, a subject I had avoided. "Between the Acts" and "12 East Scott Street" were inspired by his suggestion. Both are very confessional. I didnžt want to include them in the book, but Frank felt they belonged there. I still feel uncomfortable reading them in public. They feel so raw. Frank and I once read together at the Grolier Bookshop in Cambridge and he asked me to read them. I was sweating. But after the reading, people singled out those poems in their comments. The question is: how do you keep that punched-in-the-gut feeling yet render a work of art? As Frost says: "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." I have a tendency to pull away from subjects (thatžs the classical ballet disciplined part of me) when I should be digging deeper and probing further.
GGB: At the beginning of the interview, you mentioned Oxford Poetry. In closing, can you talk about that magazine and your role there?
EP: Oxford Poetry debuted June 1983. I served as co-editor through the winter of 1987-88. My co-founders were Mick Imlah, Nick Jenkins and Nicola Richards. We began the magazine at Magdalen College under the aegis of John Fuller, who was, and still is, an Oxford don. Because of him, many poets went to Magdalen (which also boasts a deer park and the famous tower where the choir sings May morning). John suggested we begin a British poetry magazine. We operated on a shoe-string budget, although we did receive funding from Southern Arts. We looked for new talent and first published such poets as Walter Kirn (now a novelist), Gwyneth Lewis, Michael Hofmann, and Glyn Maxwell. We published interviews with Richard Ellman, Stephen Spender, Anne Stevenson, Amy Clampitt, George Steiner and Paul Muldoon. We also ran features on younger poets (Irish and American) and sponsored translation competitions, in an effort to represent poems from both Britain and the U.S. It was a great joy co-founding and co-editing that magazine and I look back on those years with great fondness.
ELF is an international quarterly of significant contemporary literature, which publishes poetry, short fiction, essays, literary book reviews, interviews, photography, humor, and ethnic lore. ELF was chosen as a Top Mainstream Market for Poetry in 1996 by Writer's Digest. Gloria is an Advisory Editor.
copyright © 1997-1998 Gloria G. Brame
brame@gloria-brame.com