The former poet laureate gathers new work and selections from her 20-year career in Startlement.
During your laureateship, how did you balance bringing poetry into public spaces with the privacy required for one’s own writing?
I learned an enormous amount while I was serving as the laureate for three years, but one of the most valuable lessons I had to learn was how to untangle myself from the public role. I had to protect my privacy, my mental and physical health, my loved ones, and I needed to carve out time to be who I truly am outside of any public expectations. The larger the demands, the more I needed to deeply retreat into my private life and my private poems. I had to write a great many poems with no intention of sharing them; those private poems kept my secret self alive.
What are the central preoccupations of the collection’s new poems?
The new poems in Startlement were all written in the last few years, and many of them wrestle with the themes of what it is to be an artist in a world that often doesn’t privilege art or art making. Many of them deal with my own connection to nature and the connectedness to the living world that’s essential for my own well-being.
What most surprised you while putting this collection together?
Putting together this collection was surreal in many ways, most profoundly in the way it revealed my own preoccupations with the big questions central to my life. It seems for the last 25 years, the questions that keep returning are as follows: How do we live in a world that contains so much suffering? How do we live in a world whose beauty is otherworldly and boundless? How do we ever know each other, and is it even possible to know each other? How do we live in these bodies that are unruly and mortal? How can I offer something, even the smallest made thing, some strange idiosyncratic song, an imperfect echo, to nature and humanity so they will know how much they are loved? Then, of course, there are the themes of birds, creeks, trees, and horses. The questions are endless, and the music keeps changing. Putting together this book made me recommit to making poems. I can see how making poems has changed my life; it changed my life by making me pay attention to it.
How have your travels across the country shaped your relationship to writing about the natural world?
After traveling to almost every state in the country, I have such deep love for the diverse landscapes that make up this complicated place. From deserts spotted with saguaro cactuses and towering redwood forests that meet the Pacific Ocean to small towns in the mountains surrounded by riverine pathways and large crowded cities pulsing with life. Everywhere I went, it reminded me that we are all on this one planet together, whether we like it or not. This place is all we have. When we lose it, we lose ourselves. There is an urgency to this beauty. We must write about it.
