Interview: Cecilia Woloch
Cecilia Woloch was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up there and in rural Kentucky, one of seven children of a homemaker and an airplane mechanic. She is the recipient of a 2011 NEA fellowship and the author of six acclaimed collections of poetry: Sacrifice, a BookSense 76 Selection in 2001; Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem; Late, for which she was named Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry in 2004; Narcissus, winner of the Tupelo Press Snowbound Prize in 2006 and a finalist for the California Book Award; Carpathia, a finalist for the Milton Kessler Award, in 2009; and Earth, published in January 2015 as the winner of the Two Sylvias Press Prize for the Chapbook.
TCJWW: Earth is a beautiful chapbook that takes the reader on a long journey, and yet it’s comprised of two sections, eight poems each. How did Earth find its structure? How can a book accomplish so much in such a small space?
Woloch: It’s lovely to know that it strikes you that way. I was pleased with how the manuscript came together and, as I almost always am when a manuscript comes together, surprised. I tend to work poem-by-poem and not with a final structure in mind, for a long time just following a melody or a string of words or an image or an obsession or some combination of those things. Structuring comes later, for me, after a body of poems has been written and I start to explore how the poems speak to one another, and what story they might tell together. At that point, I work a lot on sequencing the poems. And, in the process of sequencing, I often make further revisions to individual poems.
Anyway, I think that poetry, by nature, “accomplishes a lot in a very small space.”
What I saw in these poems, when I looked at them as a body of work, was how I’d become more “earthed,” over a period of time—how I’d gone from being someone who had a pretty tenuous connection to the physical and natural world, and not much of a sense of her place in it, and in its story, to someone who feels the physical presence of her own story and history, her own spirit and these ancestral spirits, pretty acutely, and deeply, in the landscapes she moves through, as she moves through them. I wish I could find a less convoluted way to say that, because it feels to me like a pretty simple and straightforward thing. Maybe the fact that it’s hard for me to articulate is one of the reasons I wrote the poems.
The title poem and several others in Earth are poems I think of as my “weird ancestor poems,” because they came to me in a voice that seemed to me not only my own voice, really a kind of chorus, more ancestral than personal. For me, they’re about how a person who has no geographical or historical or political home finds a home for herself in the story she’s made of her life, and the story into which she’s woven her story, and a sense of eternity. That’s my hope, anyway, and that’s what the poems seemed to be saying once I put them together and started shifting them around.
TCJWW: The anaphora in Earth allows the work to find its rhythm and sing. What is your process of writing these poems? How do you find the right words to repeat, and has it ever worked unsuccessfully?
Woloch: Well, at the risk of sounding “yo-he-ro-ro,” as a friend used to say, in the first stages of writing, if the writing is going well, I’m listening more than anything. When it’s going really well, I feel as if I’m taking dictation—maybe from a part of myself that knows more than I consciously know. And because I like the rhythm of anaphora so much, and list-making, I probably do those things way too much, and I’d say that the strategy is unsuccessful a great deal of the time, if not most of the time. But I write a lot and throw away a lot. Writing is a practice, after all, though my method may not be very practical. I do think that my love of language and my attentiveness to its music, when I’m reading and when I’m writing, have helped me to develop a pretty good ear. I was read aloud to, as a child, and I loved that, and I love reading aloud to other people, so I suppose I’ve practiced a lot and honed my reading-aloud skills. I also did a lot of studying, on my own, of meter, and I think that’s an important thing for writers to do, in order to develop that “ear,” whether or not they want to write metered verse.
TCJWW: Several poems in Earth are prose blocks (like “What Was Promised Me”) while others use line and stanza breaks to find their form on the page. How does the un-lineated form effect meaning? What were some of the things you thought about when guiding these poems to their forms?
Woloch: For me, the material either comes with a form or there’s a form that it requires and my job is to find out what that is, to keep trying different things until the best form for the material emerges. It’s not always a very fluid process. Sometimes the struggle to find the right form goes on for years. But I’ve become more patient than I ever dreamed I could be. There’s a poem in Earth that I started in 1994, put away for 20 years, then recovered and worked on for another year or so before I decided to include it in the manuscript.
I know some poets who always write first drafts in prose, then lineate afterwards. I often start by writing in blocks of prose because that feels less self-conscious to me than writing in lines. If a poem works as a block of prose—and I work very hard to get the music just write in prose-poems, via syntax, punctuation, etc ...—then I usually don’t lineate, because it doesn’t feel necessary. Also, I like the sneakiness of the prose-poem, as a form, how it doesn’t announce what it is when you see it on the page. But I’ve also taken lines and phrases from something I’ve written in a block of prose and used those lines to begin a poem in lines or even in form. On the other hand, poems that I start writing in lines usually stay in lines, though line breaks and stanza breaks change a lot as a poem goes through the revision process.
I think that prose-poems are more private—they seem more interior to me—and that lineated poems more public.
TCJWW: I’m personally drawn to the poem “Her Tree,” a poem that feels mystical and surreal, almost but not quite fairytale-like. It’s as if it tries to ascend but is ultimately tied to the earth. Can you speak about the surreal in your work?
Woloch: Well, I don’t think of my work as surreal, at all—so maybe it’s my life that’s surreal? Or maybe I’ve loved fairytales so much—I was sort of raised on fairytales—that I just see my life through that lens. The tree in “Her Tree” is an actual tree, and the events the poem describes are things that actually happened: there was a tree in a field where the house in which my grandmother was born had once stood—a house that was later burned down, as most of the houses in that village were—and I visited that tree as I suppose someone else might visit a grave, as a way to have contact with that grandmother I never knew. In fact, I’ve visited that field and that tree many times. And in the middle of this one particular visit there was a sudden and very dramatic storm; I had to run with my plunder of weeds and wildflowers and a twig I’d snapped from the tree across the field, and the grass was waist-high and the field seemed like a sea to me in that wind, and I turned and saw the tree with its branches waving as if waving good-bye. Then I brought the plunder from the field—the twig and weeds and flowers—home with me and used it to make an altar, though I’d also thought of putting those things on my grandmother’s grave. Very straightforward, isn’t it? (I’m smiling here, thinking how strange poets can be.) Maybe the fact that the tree is in the Carpathians—a place that has always had a fairytale quality for me—accounts for that quality in the poem.
TCJWW: I know you travel all over the world. What relationship do you see between place and poetry for you as a writer? A reader? An inhabitant of Earth?
Woloch: I don’t know if I’d have a sense of place, at all, if I didn’t travel. I think it’s really easy these days in the U.S. to feel as if you’re no place at all, because our landscapes have been made so monotonous and repetitive by big business. Everywhere you look, everything looks the same. And my home base in the U.S. is Los Angeles, which is notorious—rightly or wrongly—for feeling like “nowhere.” Also, people live so much in digital reality these days, never looking up from their phones at the world around them, more so in America than elsewhere. But of course there are gorgeous places in America, gorgeous wildernesses still.
For me, personally, I think there’s just something about moving through the world that makes the world seem both more vivid and more magical. Whenever I’m in an unfamiliar landscape, I’m so much more awake to it, so much more aware. And I feel most awake, and most at home, when I’m in motion. And because I’m always writing as I’m traveling, I’m aware, too, of how the landscape, as it shifts, is affecting me. I think you can accomplish the same thing by staying in one place and staying awake to it; but, as I’ve said, if you’re in a landscape that’s been made to look like every other landscape, or made into nothing but a background for corporate logos, it’s much harder to see where you really are, to feel a sense of place.
Maybe what Earth is “about,” finally, is having become an inhabitant of the earth. I think for a long time I was just kind of hovering, not really sure if I wanted to be here or not, living mostly in an inner world of my own creation. A lot of us are elsewhere much of the time, I think. But this was a task for me that seems to have been karmic, this coming to feel that I belonged here, that my life was part of the life of the earth, part of the story, too. I had a “kyros moment” one of the first times I was in the Carpathians—a moment when it felt as if my whole perspective shifted, and my whole life. I was at a festival in a tiny village called Olchowiecz, a festival that celebrates the culture of a sort of lost tribe, the Lemko people, an originally nomadic people who once lived in this region but live in exile now—people who are or were my people, as far as I can tell. I was standing on a hillside with my friend, Sarah, in a graveyard above an old wooden church. It was raining and there were votive candles flickering on the graves. Farther below, the festival organizers were trying to get a bonfire lit in a muddy field, and the musicians were tuning up their violins for the dancing that would last late into the night. I was pretty muddy, myself, and probably hadn’t bathed in several days, and had just reached that point Hélène Cixous describes when she writes, “Exile is an uncomfortable situation. It is also a magical situation.” I stood there and suddenly felt as if I were standing in both worlds at once, as if I were alive and dead at the same time. I turned to Sarah and said, “I feel like the smallest drop in the biggest bucket in the universe.” And she said, “Yeah, me too.”
TCJWW: What inspires you now? Are there any projects in the works?
Woloch: I’m always working on something—or, usually, on several things at once. I think the work is all a continuum. One project seems to feed into—or spill into—the next. Or maybe it’s all one big project? I have a new full-length poetry manuscript that’s nearly finished, and a collection of essays that’s getting close, I hope. But the main focus of my writing for the past ten years has been a long work in narrative and lyrical prose, a kind of travel memoir and family history and geopolitical murder mystery, all rolled into one. It centers on that paternal grandmother who was also the inspiration for my book-length poem, “Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem,” and who “disappeared” before I was born. It seems she was murdered, and the murder was covered up, and it all had something to do with the political underground she was a part of, which seems to have extended from the U.S. back to the village where she was born in the Carpathian Mountains of southeastern Poland. I wasn’t quite prepared for all the research I’ve had to do to get the material for this book, and all the travel, but it’s been quite an adventure. And this is the book I feel I was born to write—if there’s any such thing as being born to write anything—and the reason I became a writer, in the first place—so that I could tell the story of this grandmother—the same grandmother who “would die too young with her mouth full of earth,” who was silenced for a reason I’ve yet to discover, whose spirit is the spirit in the tree in “Her Tree,” and who has always been my muse.
Photo credit:
Poet photo courtesy of twosylviaspress.com / photo by Mark Savage
