Oklahoma Voices: Carol Hamilton

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Transcript:

Buddy Johnson: Today is August the 13th, 2007, and we’re in Oklahoma City at the Downtown Library as part of the Oklahoma Voices Project, and today we’re talking to Carol Hamilton. She was Poet Laureate of Oklahoma in 1995 to 1997, and she’s here to talk to us today a little bit about her life and about poetry. And Carol, can you start by telling us where and when you were born?

Carol Hamilton: I was born in Enid, Oklahoma, 1935, and I was always told that Enid meant dine backwards, because everyone stopped to eat there in the old days. But I’ve been told that’s an apocryphal tale.

BJ: Oh, okay.

CH: My Mom and Dad were both from Kansas, but had lived in Chicago during the Depression, and my Dad came to work in the oil refinery in Enid. He had unhappy experiences with union there, because they walked out, and he decided to stay and turn the machinery off instead of just letting it go on uncared for, and he got all beaten up when he came out, so he was always a kind of a “not for the unions”, and I always was kind of for them, and so this was always a point of contention. But he later worked for Oklahoma Gas & Electric there.

BJ: In Enid?

CH: In Enid, yes. And then we moved to Oklahoma City.

BJ: Okay. When, that was, when they asked, when you came, so did they come to Oklahoma after the Depression, or in the middle of it?

CH: I think it was pretty much still on.

BJ: If you were born there, I guess it would have been, so…

CH: Yes, I was born in Enid, so it was kind of at the end of the Depression.

BJ: Okay. So that’s another thing I wanted to ask you, where all else did you live during your childhood?

CH: Well, we lived in Enid ‘til I was 12, and it was kind of a strange story, because my Aunt and Uncle had come to Oklahoma City, and they visited Midwest City, the new “model” city that was being built. And they were talking about it and I went to bed that night and prayed that we would move to Midwest City. And right away my father got transferred to Oklahoma City OG&E, so I learned to be very careful what I prayed for because it got answered right away.

BJ: Did you--why did you want to move to Midwest City? Did it just sound….?

CH: Oh yes. They were telling him how the streets were laid out, so the traffic would go slow, and everything was new, and so it sounded like heaven to 12-year-old me. So, I went to high school and junior high in Midwest City.

BJ: Did you, I guess you kind of grew up during the war years too. Did that--what’s your memories of the world at war? I mean….

CH: I remember every Saturday we would go out searching for Double Bubble g, because you couldn’t get it, and we were always sure we would find it. And, I remember rolling up foil from the packages of g to make tin foil for the war effort, and of course, sugar was rationed. We thought we were very patriotic. In fact, the worst thing we did, was we were quite sure this woman in our neighborhood, whose husband, I think was in the war, and she lived in a big house and had a baby and kept her blinds down, and we were sure she was a Nazi spy. So, we would check her mail, and were sure we would find a letter from Hitler, and turn her into Roosevelt, and get medals. And we started digging a tunnel from the alley to come up under her house and get in and find out. We never got arrested, fortunately, and my life of crime ended there.

BJ: Well, it was in the service of your country.

CH: Exactly! Yes.

BJ: That sounds like it would make a good children’s novel.

CH: Well, I have written a story about it.

BJ: Okay, cool. So, when did you start writing?

CH: I started writing seriously, as a child we wrote stories for each other, so, and I won some essay contests and short story contests throughout school, different times, but I’d never thought about being a writer, and we lived in Scotland one year and during that year I discovered you can get bored. Time seems to go a lot slower and you don’t get put on any committees when you’re living in another country. And when I came back, it was kind of like, it was a fallow period and I began writing and, I was writing and publishing short stories, and--

BJ: Is this in your adult life?

CH: Yes. And I really began publishing when my children were little.

BJ: Okay. So, I guess you married and had children then?

CH: Yes.

BJ: Was that right out of high school, or did you go to college?

CH: No. I went to Phillips University in Enid and then got married after my third year, and finished in Connecticut and we were in graduate school at Yale, and then we went to graduate school at St. Andrews in Scotland. And then--

BJ: I wondered how you got there.

CH: Yeah, okay. And then we started moving back. We lived in upstate New York, and Indiana, Indianapolis, and Ohio, up near Cleveland, and West Virginia, for five years, near Pittsburgh, up in the panhandle, and I believe that is all before I got back to Oklahoma in ‘71.

BJ: So what kind of things did you write about when you wrote--you said, you know, you started writing for each other and things when you were younger…but what kind of--what were your themes or what did you write about?

CH: In those days, we mostly wrote things to scare each other. Ghost stories, but I used to sit and watch when my father would go in and out of work and see what I considered poor children and I would always write stories about poor children. And I never could finish the stories, but I could get them started.

BJ: And then, when you were writing as an adult, and you said you won some contests and things, what, did you have any over-arcing themes there or did you…what sorts of things did you write?

CH: When I began writing seriously, I was just, I loved to read, and of course you always want to write something that’s sort of like what you like, and I loved writing short stories, and my first published, nationally published piece, was an article called “Winnie the Pooh is Existentialist”, and it was published in a YMCA, YM, YW, YMCA college magazine, the Intercollegiate, and it was about relationships. That was in the period when everybody was having encounter groups, where you meet someone and you tell them all your troubles immediately, and so that you really relate and it was kind of against that we could wait and get to know each other as friends.

BJ: So then, let’s see…I guess you sort of answered this, I wanted to know, did you think you would be a professional writer or what kind of goals did you have, you know, like maybe your major in college, or what kind of--?

CH: Well, I was…I started out in religious education. Then I married a man who was a college chaplain and minister, so I changed to education so I taught elementary school, and pretty much, as I said, I hadn’t really thought about writing until I started, and then my goal was to get published, which is what I worked at and continue to.

BJ: Now, I have to say that at this point, I’m doing this sort of like loyal opposition, because I don’t understand poetry, and I just have never got it. So, it’s not that I’m against it, I just don’t really understand it. So, my question then is, what’s the point? What is, why do we write poems?

CH: Well, I’ll have to agree with you. I grew up not caring a thing about poetry. Never dreamed I’d write poetry, or books for children, which are the two things I do now. I like the nursery rhymes, I guess, but in school we had to stand up and memorize and recite to the class, and I didn’t like that, saw not much point in it, but when I had kind of a tragedy in my life, back in 1968 in Ohio, a friend came and she was later a magazine poetry editor, and also wrote books of biology. But she brought me some poetry that she’d written when she was in the psychiatric ward a couple of times with kind of teenage suicide

syndrome, and she said, “you know, in hard times, writing poetry helped me”. She said, “this wasn’t really good poetry, but it helped me get through that”. And I got tied up, so she suggested writing poetry and I began writing it and I had to learn what was good about it, and find people I liked, and it was a long process for me, but I did find, because I always liked John Donne, the poet, the way he made these strange comparisons, a 1600 poet, a 17th century poet, and I liked the music of the late 60’s, Simon & Garfunkel, Judy Collins, and Bob Dylan and they used a lot of metaphor and a lot of interesting comparisons, and that was the way I started writing and it started being published right away. And I read and read and read, and I agree with you thoroughly, if you don’t enjoy it, I say put it aside, and read something else, but you’ll find that you’ll find things that you just love, and then keep exploring and it becomes a part of your life.

BJ: Yeah it’s funny you say that ‘cause the two people that I like, or that I understand or I get it is John Donne and Jane Taylor.

CH: Yes! Jane Taylor is a wonderful friend of mine and she’s a wonderful poet, yeah!

BJ: Okay, great! I don’t know if they had anything similar at all but for some reason I really understand theirs. I guess you just have to find that right person. So other than Donne, who are some of your early well not necessarily early, who are some people who really speak to you?

CH: Well, there are so many now it’s hard to even begin, but it took me a long time. The first one whom I found, I loved his poem, after John Donne was Stanley Kunitz who died as our poet laureate. He signed a ten-book contract at age 90 and I think he fulfilled it.

BJ: Wow!

CH: But at any rate he had a wonderful poem called “The Dark and the Fair”, and I loved that poem, and I’ve memorized a lot of poetry but that was the first one I memorized. But then I would go buy his books and I would find that a lot of them didn’t speak to me. But now they do, it’s just, I think, I write every day and I write about an hour every morning, so usually write a poem a day, and that’s kind of a meditation time for me, and it’s when I discover what I know that day, what I am feeling, I don’t set out with a goal, I just sit down and wait until something happens. And so, when I read other poets now, I can feel that moment, when they are feeling it. There’s a certain moment when you are writing and all of a sudden it seems to kind of click, and everything seems to fall into place, and you have a finished feeling. It’s not finished, you still have to work on it, but that feeling, I think, is what draws us all.

BJ: It germinates. So, you’ve been a teacher, you know, most of your adult life, if not all of it. How do you approach people like me, or students who don’t, who…you know, it’s not that I’m, that I don’t or that I refuse to understand it, just the way my brain works or has been trained. When you ran into students like that did you, I mean, are some people just a lost cause, or do you--?

CH: I don’t think so. Of course, we usually worked at it where you are writing, as you are reading poetry as well, and I think once you start writing your own you begin to see what kind of things you really are looking for and you can find others who write that way. It’s just in school, we’re kind of taught you’ve

got to understand this poem; you have to understand what all the symbols mean. Nobody writes that way.

BJ: Okay.

CH: So, I don’t teach it that way. It’s find something you like, and then enjoy it, and so that’s really the way I would, had approached it. I taught poetry at the University of Central Oklahoma for about seven years and there were a few that never did really like it, but they got through it.

BJ: So you, it is something you can apply good old hard working American values to if you need to or something?

CH: I think so.

BJ: Okay. Now did, I was gonna ask you, you discovered poetry, or it discovered you, but I think you mentioned that it kind of found you, didn’t it, so….

CH: It did, yeah.

BJ: And, now you also mentioned that you lived in so many different places, and I wondered if those how much of an impact or an influence those different places had in your writing?

CH: The interesting thing to me was, in coming back to Oklahoma after growing up here, and I started writing poetry in ’68 and came back in ’71 and it was like I was returning to a very forgotten familiar place. It was like green when spring comes and all of a sudden, you remember that, but it’s so surprising. And I got really, really interested in this land and this landscape. So a lot of my poetry really, the imagery changed, and one of the early, early poems I wrote, I’ll share with you. It talks a little bit about the landscape. I’m talking about my son, when he was about five, and using the Oklahoma landscape. I read this in Tennessee, and realized that some people don’t know what a mesa is. So, when I read it other places, I always explain what a mesa is, because this talks about a mesa.

Steven, you sit at my side and chatter, while the days of your nearness erode like the red hill side gullies, no one saw wash away until they puckered prune like under dry mesas and stated a new topography and I shall not miss you until you are gone, nor hear your voice slide away until I discover myself a new contour and find much of myself forgotten as if it had never begun.

BJ: That’s great.

CH: So, a lot of the poetry that I wrote when I came back had a lot to do with the imagery of our land and also some of the ideas, the openness. I write a lot too, about the fact that everything, like our dirt doesn’t even stay put, so the land that we stand on may have come from somewhere else and it’s not gonna be here long. Everything is fresh often, all the time. And another was a Native American belief of some of the plains tribes, that a man is as big as the distance he can see, so sort of the expansiveness and the always starting over feeling of the land here has influenced my writing a lot.

BJ: Do you find that when, within, within the Oklahoma geography, is…my family is from Dewey County which is not far from where you grew up, and the poem you just read is, you know, I could see all the roads I drove and you know, I know exactly what you are talking about there, and, but you know, that’s not the way it is. My wife is from the Talequah area in Eastern Oklahoma and it’s nothing, I don’t mean it’s nothing like what you are saying, but…

CH: No, it’s a different landscape.

BJ: But do you find inspiration in each half of Oklahoma, or…

CH: If I have it here, I’ll read another one, I think I do.

BJ: Okay.

CH: The fact that the state, for example, goes Black Mesa, in the west, is the highest point in the state and yet, it looks very flat, and you go down and you get to the mountains, and that’s the lowest part of the state. So this, I have a lot of poems named “Red Land”, and this one was “Red Land 4”. And it goes:

Black Jack oaks goes knobbing and humping eastward, recreating themselves as they go, searching out high hills and rain beyond where the vapor trail stops the sun. Captures a bit of light and makes tracks. To the west, even the scrub oak lose heart, give out to the aridity. Creekside arbors bend low in deference to the south wind. Downward off the Rockies, the state slopes, from high flat lands to low mountains, a paradox. We walk tipped against the wind and the great continental fold. Against the scorching and the icy gales, caught in extremes. Survivors need room to move about, where extinction carves out space.

So, I do find other parts of the state are just as evocative, and our history is very fascinating and that plays a large role in a lot of my writing as well.

BJ: Okay, great. Now, I think, just reading your biographical material that I’ve seen, you also are a storyteller.

CH: Yes.

BJ: Now what can you do as a storyteller that you can’t do as a poet? Or, you know, how do those two interact for you? Or vice versa.

CH: Storytelling, I got into because I was teaching in elementary gifted for 12 years and we wrote our own programs, and I, I tended to teach a lot of things that were gaps in my own education, and mythology was one of those gaps. I just didn’t learn it in school, and I was so fascinated so I would learn the Greek myths and tell them to the children. And then of course, they became storytellers, as well, and I started learning folk stories and attending Winter Tales here in Oklahoma City back when, before it was Winter Tales, and I loved doing the storytelling, because you’re, the children are right with you. It’s like you create a magic lantern between you when you start telling the stories, so…

BJ: So do you find that they, I guess it’s, cause like our earliest poetry, if you want to call it that, if you go back to say, Beowulf or something, I know that’s not true poetry, but I mean do you…

CH: Oh yes, it is.

BJ: Well I guess it is, yeah. I always heard that they chanted it or whatever, you know and that doesn’t mean it’s not poetry I guess, but see, I have problems with it. [laughter] But so, do you find, does that experience, do they trade off, do you ever write poems that you think you might tell, like in a storytelling situation, or you know…

CH: Not exactly, but the sound is very important in both cases and when I write a poem, I always record it and listen to it and work with it that way, because how it sounds, even if you’re reading on the page is an important….and the storytelling, I don’t memorize stories, you tell them, but of course, there are a lot of things that keep coming into them because you find out what works, and the sound is what carries it, I think; the magic of storytelling.

BJ: Okay. I also wondered, how much music is in your poetry, do you think?

CH: Hopefully, a lot. [laughs] I grew up playing the piano, and I play the guitar and I love music. I’m not expert, by any means, but music is very important.

BJ: Okay, so if you had to describe your poetry then, and if you could equate it to a musical form, or genre, what, how would you tell someone, what would you tell someone?

CH: That’s kind of hard to say because as I said, I write a poem a day and I’ve been doing that since 1968. So I use every kind of poetry you can imagine, it’s just whatever happens, and I tend, a lot of the poetry is just a response to what’s happening in nature, or in my life, but often it’s trying to deal with some philosophical question, so a lot of it is trying to figure life out, too.

BJ: Do you think, I know you mentioned earlier, Simon & Garfunkel, maybe not necessarily an influence, but you enjoyed..

CH: Definitely they were an influence.

BJ: Yeah, okay. And, do you find that, I was thinking of another question at the same time, but do you find that, is, are songs poetry to, I know they can be. I was reading an interview, I think it was with Ted Kuzer, a while back, in the Humanities interview magazine, and he seemed to say that, you know, like Dylan’s songs aren’t really poetry, and that he, you know, if you stood up and read it at a poetry thing, it wouldn’t necessarily sound like a poem, or what, do you find that…

CH: I disagree with him somewhat, although, for example, I used to like some of John Denver’s songs. Well, those are pretty, that would be pretty clichéd poetry, because the images are you know, well, night in the forest, a walk in the rain. It’s not too original, but if you take the one poem that I loved, which is a song of Simon & Garfunkel, was a Dangling Conversation which goes:

It was a still life watercolor of a now late afternoon /and the sun shines through the curtain lace and shadows wash the room/and we sit and sip our coffee couched in our indifference/ like shells upon the shore/you can hear the ocean roar/lost in the dangling conversation/and the superficial sighs the borders of our lives/you read your Emily Dickinson and I my Robert Frost/and we mark our place with bookmarkers that measure what we’ve lost.

And that is poetry to me, and I thought a lot of Bob Dylan’s was as well.

BJ: Okay.

CH: But not every song is poetry, a lot of…

BJ: Okay.

CH: A lot of it’s verse, and there is a difference.

BJ: Okay. How sacred do you think poetry is? If you want to answer it like that, you can, or I can qualify with what I was thinking, if you…

CH: Well, I’ll try to answer it, and then you can qualify what you were thinking. I don’t think I think poetry is sacred and yet it is sacred to me because as I said, it’s a point of meditation for me really. And it’s so, sacred thing because I am really trying to get at the truth. We always say you have to tell the truth when you write a poem, you don’t have to stick to the facts, however. So, you can make up things, but you want to get to that heart of truth and that’s sacred as far as I’m concerned. And I find sacredness in the links that I feel when I feel other poets finding those moments and finding the exact words to say exactly what the experience was or as close as you can get. And it’s an impossibility to ever get that perfect. So, in that sense, it’s another sacred way.

BJ: Okay.

CH: But I wouldn’t say okay, poetry is sacred and we all have to…

BJ: Okay. Well that’s what I was wondering. How, if like, you know, I wondered how much fun you can have with it, you, not one, if you, I suppose it would vary by poet, because you have your Ogden Nash and things, you know, a light verse…

CH: Which are great.

BJ: But like, you know, if I just said “chocolate ice cream. Write a poem.” You know, is that being too flip with the form?

CH: Oh no, we did that all the time. We did that kind of thing all the time. And one of the things I always used to always do with children is, I’d pop popcorn and tell them to close their eyes and write a poem of everything it sounded like. And one of the best I ever had was, I was teaching in the ghetto school in Indianapolis before the schools were integrated, just the faculties, and these, I had about 34 2nd graders who, I only had a couple who could read, even. But they said it sounds like an army of ants marching

over the roof. And I thought, that is the best I’ve ever heard. Poetry really is playing with words, it really is, even serious play. But it’s play.

BJ: Okay. That was a later question I wanted to ask you was how you feel about coining words and do you…

CH: Do it!

BJ: Okay.

CH: It’s fun. You know, if it will work and you can make it fun, I think it should be.

BJ: Okay. Now when you read, you know, for a reading or for a group of people, what do you, what do you hope they take away from the experience?

CH: Well, what you hope is that they can see what you’re seeing, they can feel what you’re feeling and you usually can tell when you are reading when a group is really with you. It’s just like the storytelling; it’s something created between you. I absolutely hate to do a reading with spotlight in my eyes, because if you can’t see the people, how can you relate to them? And I think it’s a very, the art needs, like storytelling, it needs to be a give and take, otherwise it just falls flat.

BJ: So then to follow up, like, a question I had about that was, do you like it when people say, like for example, I just said, gave you my experience with Dewey County and how I relate to your poem. But that, you know, the way I think of it may not be the way you meant, or does that bother you to have…

CH: No, that’s…

BJ: Because again, to draw on Dylan, I remember hearing once that he, was a famous radio show call in and someone said that they related to his things and this and that, and he just chewed ‘em out for…

CH: Really?

BJ: Yeah, he said, “I write what I write for me and I don’t care whether you like it or not. I don’t wanna know what you think” and you know, do you, I’m not picking on him, I suppose there are poets who don’t want to know what you think, but…

CH: I’m sure. I suppose. But I think most poets, in fact, often when I’m doing a reading, I say “don’t worry because the point of poetry is, I’ll have an image that will capture you because it’s in your experience and you’ll start thinking about that”, and the poem’s been a success so your story becomes…in fact there was a book that was called “The Poem is Process”, quite a long while ago by David Swanger, and he said the poem isn’t complete until the listener or reader brings his experience to it, and I agree with that.

BJ: Okay. And let’s see…you’ve kind of answered some of this, but I wondered about your discipline as a writer. Whether you are disciplined or not and what is your routine? You gave us a glimpse of that earlier, but take us from when the alarm clock goes off to…

CH: Okay. Well, I don’t sleep much. I usually get up about 4 and I always usually write from five to six. I’ve done it for years, I went to a writer’s workshop at the University of Indiana, back in 1968 and won first prize in short story there from Jesse Hill Ford, who at the time was a well-known short story writer for The Atlantic, and he said, you’ve got to write three hours every day. And I started doing that, actually, I was doing that from 4 to 7 in the morning, before my kids woke up, and then my boys discovered that I was up, and then started getting up to play, so I started writing from 9 to midnight, and, you write very differently at night than you do in the morning. It’s a very different flavor to the writing, a very different emotional tone. But I, went back to work teaching full time when I moved, I guess about 1970 and then the only way I could write at all was to write early in the morning before I went. Because teaching takes so much creative energy, you can’t write when you get home at night.

BJ: Okay. And where do you write? What’s the physical location?

CH: I just sit at the dining room table in my living room and write by hand: poetry. Now, if I am writing books, or short stories, or prose, I do it on the computer. But poetry, I have to have the physical act of writing by hand. But the computer has simplified our lives wonderfully, because you can go in and put it on the computer, and change lines, change endings, line breaks and, move it around the page and it’s a big help.

BJ: I’ve heard some scholars decry that though. I can’t think of the word now, you know, but they miss that because they are saying that we have so much great insight from Twain and whoever, you know, we have all their edits…

CH: That’s true.

BJ: And now we get the final version, you know we can’t…

CH: Right, that’s true. That is a loss.

BJ: That leads me though to my next question. I wondered how much, or if you edit your own poems?

CH: Yes.

BJ: Or if you have someone else do it?

CH: Oh no…Well, we do have critique groups. Most writers work with critique groups. I never did, until about five years ago or so, when I quit teaching. Some friends that had been my students talked me into coming once or twice to a critique group they wanted to keep going and I got involved. So, I’m in two critique groups: one for writing for children, one for poetry.

BJ: And now when you, how many times do you revise a poem? Like if you sit down at four in the morning and you say I’m going to write about this and…or you said you wait for something to happen, and when it happens and you’re inspired, how many time do you revise it? Do you need to edit it, or does it just come right off the page?

CH: I only remember ever writing one poem that I didn’t change at all, and that was, I was in a motel with my kids and they were climbing all over me, and I wrote a poem that I never did revise and I don’t know how that happened, but usually you have to revise. I usually, I keep my work maybe about a week. I publish a lot and I send everything out, so I usually finish a poem and then I will have the other things from other days that I have done that week and I have them on the tape recorder and I will go back and re-read and revise those and then I’ll put the new one on the computer and all week I’ll be re-revising those. But I come to a point, I usually quit and I know some poets that year after year keep revising the same poems and I don’t, although if I have to go back and make a new copy because it’s getting too doggy or…well I may revise it again then.

BJ: Okay.

CH: But I usually forget about them once they are finished and sent off in the mail. And then when they come out in the magazine, I’ll read it and I’ll say, “Did I write that?”, and I’ll start laughing and I couldn’t have been that funny, so… [laughs]

BJ: Well that’s what I wondered. Now, when you…first let me ask, do you find that when you do edit, before you send it off obviously, do you put more in, or do you take more out? Like, do you overwrite it first?

CH: Usually, you take out. A lot of moving around. What you really look for a lot is words that could be a lot more interesting or imaginative; words that you have used too many times or the sound doesn’t sound right when you read it out loud. Maybe the language just isn’t fresh, it’s just something clichéd and sometimes you can’t see that, and that’s what a critique group helps. But we don’t do that often enough to help – we only do it once a month, so like one poem a month gets critiqued.

BJ: How often does the poem that you sat down to write, you know when you got that initial inspiration and you thought you were going to write about this, how often does it not turn out to be what you sat down to write?

CH: I don’t think it ever turns out what I set out to write. Usually, if I have an idea, sometimes I’ll get an idea when I’m driving and I’ll just jot a little something down and throw it in the pile and if I can’t think what to write, I’ll pick up something that may be ten years old. So, it’s going to mean something, but I don’t know until I start writing with it what it means.

BJ: Do you have any mark that you can think of where you sat, you know, you remember having something that you really wanted to write about and then when you started putting pencil to paper…

CH: It went off somewhere else?

BJ: Yes. Is it just so common that you…

CH: No, because I very rarely know what I want to write. I don’t decide ahead I’m going to make a poem or...although, I very often want to hold onto an experience and keep it alive and shape it so that it still

exists for me, like a photograph, kind of, and I think I just keep working until I get that as close as I think I can.

BJ: So, have you ever written anything to make a point? Like a…I guess there is social poetry and…

CH: Oh yeah.

BJ: Things like that.

CH: Political poems, oh yeah, I have some, yeah.

BJ: Alright. So, you don’t…I mean, it’s not all a personal journey then for you.

CH: No, no, it’s not.

BJ: Okay. Then, how often do you write with a particular audience in mind?

CH: I’m not sure I ever do.

BJ: Really? Okay.

CH: I don’t think so, except, I’ve been asked to write poems for occasions, like, I guess I can say it because this isn’t going out anywhere, the inauguration of a friend is coming up and I’ve been asked to write a poem for that. And for that, you have a specific audience in mind. When I was Poet Laureate, they sometimes ask you to write for dedications of certain things, or certain events. Then you definitely have an audience in mind.

BJ: I write a little bit. Not poetry, but I can see, sometimes, like I can almost see, if I close my eyes, people that I know reading it and how they are reacting. Obviously, that’s going to have some effect, I try not to let it, or I can just hear what my mother would say…

CH: [Laughs) That, you have to turn off. [laughs]

BJ: Or, do you find that you can do that?

CH: Yeah, I just write and I’ll just assume that they’ll never see it. But you know what? I took Marilyn Harris’ novel course when I was getting my master’s, and she said “Oh just go ahead and write about people, they’ll never recognize themselves”. Well, I had a story that was published in Byline, and it used two or three friends, kind of rolled into one character and one of my friends who was one of them read it and she said “That’s me, isn’t it?” immediately, so it does happen. But I don’t think of it when I am writing, though.

BJ: That’s good! That’s probably the best, if you can train yourself…

CH: Yeah, turn it off.

BJ: So, what are some of your guilty pleasures as a poet? Your poetic guilty pleasures, like…

CH: Oh, I just love alliteration! And then I do way too much of it. So, I ought to take it out and then people say you should only do that for comic effect and it’s not always comic with me, because I just love alliteration. That’s one of my…

BJ: One of my questions was going to be what crutches do you find yourself relying on or using? Would that be one of them for you, then?

CH: I don’t know, I just love it. I love the sound and so I play with it a lot, and another thing I play with a lot is metaphor, and there are schools of poetry that don’t want any metaphor of any kind, so there are a lot of different schools. The only poem, and I won’t quote it quite right, and I don’t memorize my own poetry, but the only poem I can remember that I wrote I went to Lionel Wiggam’s poetry workshop at the University of Indiana, and I had just started writing poetry. So, you had to be accepted to the workshop, so I was sitting in the outer dark corners, listening, and I wrote:

Two by two the poets came of every style and creed/and true to form the species did refuse to interbreed.

Because they didn’t get along at all, because some say you should do this, and others say you shouldn’t, and I don’t believe there are any rules for poetry, personally.

BJ: So do you feel that you yourself can go…you don’t box yourself in and say “I’m a freeform poet” or…

CH: No.

BJ: Or “I don’t write sonnets” or whatever.

CH: Oh, I do write sonnets. I love to write in various forms and it’s just like working a crossword puzzle for people who love to do that, and I love to do it. And I do it, I just get in the mood and I do them for a while.

BJ: Do you follow the rules of each form when you...I guess then it wouldn’t be a form.

CH: I do, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I take the form and play with it, but a lot of times I try to follow. It’s kind of like I would tell my students; you kind of have to write a sonnet just a like a figure skater has to do a figure eight: just right and then you do your free form later. But to see if you can do it is the main thing.

BJ: I had the experience where I liked to write, I tried to…I like haiku, because it’s short, for one thing.

CH: Yes (laughs)

BJ: I do like the structure of it, but then I found out later that it has to be about nature, and it has to be…

CH: Yes, I know.

BJ: And I thought, oh forget that, I’m just writing it.

CH: I agree with you.

BJ: So, you said earlier, just now that you don’t memorize your own poems…

CH: But I do memorize other people’s.

BJ: Alright. Okay. What I wondered was, when you do a reading, do you read it from what has been published, or do you just…if you don’t memorize it, I guess you can’t just say it…

CH: No, I read it. But other people’s poems I do sometimes recite at a reading, because I think we need to hear the good poetry. I don’t know if you’re interested, but I am going to tell you. I was struggling so long to find out what poetry was, because I really, as I told you, cared nothing about it when I started and I just would finally tell people in workshops well, you just have to read a lot of poetry and write a lot of poetry and hone your taste over the years. But I went to a workshop with W.S. Merwin over in Tulsa and he said “I’m not going to do a workshop, I’m just going to answer questions”. And I was so disappointed, but I learned more that day from him than I’ve ever learned from anyone, and he said when he was 18, he went to Princeton, New Jersey to the hospital to visit Ezra Pound and he asked him what he could tell him to help him be a good poet, and Ezra Pound said “I can’t teach you anything to make you a good poet. All you can do is memorize a lot of poetry and translate a lot of poetry”. So, I came home, and I started memorizing poetry and I started translating poetry, which I like to do. And I don’t work at it a huge amount, but I’ve got quite a long list of things I’ve got memorized now.

BJ: Do you think you have an idea, your own definition of what is a good poem from all the reading you’ve done?

CH: What I think is a good poem, somebody else might…I think it’s very, very subjective. I think a good poem has a lot of original things about it, and a lot of things that, bring you along with the writer, somehow. But it’s not going to be the same for everyone.

BJ: What is the community of poets like in Oklahoma?

CH: I think it’s wonderful. We have a lot of variety, we have a lot of activity. I go to read in different parts of the country, and I’ve read in England last spring, and I run into wonderful poetry communities. But I don’t think that any are any better than what we have here in Oklahoma. We have a lot going on and a lot of different schools. It’s just very supportive, that’s my opinion. But you know, talk to some people who say that this group doesn’t like that group. But I think we all get along pretty well.

BJ: You mentioned that you do work together a lot of times, and critiquing and things, so that was my other question. Does the community of poets, are there any projects or any kind of initiatives or anything that they…

CH: Like political things?

BJ: That, or just say “we’re going to get poetry in the schools” or anything like that? Do you know of any movements or efforts to broaden the access to poetry?

CH: Well, one of the things that I have been personally involved in is this Woody Guthrie Festival, which we got started and it’s become really a part of that festival and we really would like to let poetry be a part of some other things, things like Astronomy Star Party weekends and things, because at Arts Festivals or like Winfield, the Bluegrass Festival, but finding the time to organize all these things is something else. Of course, there are programs for poets in schools, through the Arts Council, and we all do workshops in the schools all the time whenever they ask us, and they ask quite a bit.

BJ: Great. What do you, what would you say was your, the best poem…I don’t really know how to word it, but what do you think is your best poem that you wrote? That you are proudest of?

CH: Oh my…I don’t know. But I will read you one that other people think is one of my best, and I don’t at all. Actually, I’m going to read you a couple.

BJ: Sure.

CH: One of them is an old one, called “Pioneer Women”. Again, these are the Oklahoma ones. And the other one is the one I wrote at the time of the bombing and that one has just had a life of its own. It was performed in San Francisco and it was, the BBC used it, and Peter Jennings read it on the evening news. I didn’t revise that one, so I don’t think it’s so wonderful, but because it was a public poem, I think, there was a lot of response. But this one is called “Pioneer Women” and of course, everyone in Oklahoma knows the Pioneer Woman, in Ponca City, which I grew up knowing about and seeing. But when I came back, I realized, reading diaries and letters, of these pioneer women, they weren’t all like that, so…

Pioneer Women

Not all steeled their smile and bent their back in perpetual labor

Serenely striding westward, skirts aflutter

Some rocked in catatonic wonder at their plight

Some madly wielded knives in kitchens, long before savages attacked

And many saw first sight of home in dismay

Sinking down among the ticks, the rattlers, the dust, the sweat searing heat

The endless emptiness, knowing beforehand that crops usually fail

Babies usually die, and skin shrivels and dries in the sun

Hands harden and hearts sometimes fail with despair

Still, enough expanded in the openness, enough gathered up skirts again in human struggle

Beyond stoicism, fighting reality in a battle which might someday be won, but not today.

 

And the bombing poem is called “Braced Against the Wind”:

Nothing gentles down from a mild heaven here

We are always braced against the wild wind

We were ever hand in hand, as far as the eye can see

Cataclysms are the story, our cities sprang up overnight

Are flattened at a tongue lashing by clouds

And bushwhackers, and Bonnies and Clydes struck fast

And hid against the land stretched and pegged flat to the four corners of the earth.

We do not cower at disaster

We join hands, sing hymns, we share tears

And bend our backs raising a neighbor’s barn.

Do not think your abrupt terror will destroy us

Wide horizons stretch our vision

We do not believe in limits

We shift with the red dust, dance golden like the wheat fields

We believe, we move on

We bend and dance on the tall grass

The prairie sings our pain, the land shouts our praise

The wind calls us together.

Another one that I think maybe really is my favorite, but I wouldn’t even begin to…it’s quite long. But it’s about western Oklahoma, called “Flatland” and I like it. I was coming back from my son’s wedding out in Alva and I noticed how everything in the flat land out there looks so triangular and kind of like….I was teaching art history to gifted children at the time, and Egyptian art and I was just thinking how Egypt had only this little valley, and we have all this fertile land and yet they lasted four thousand years. And I was kind of comparing how they had all this history and they kept everything, but we keep nothing. Everything blows away, our history blows away. And I have always enjoyed reading that poem, it uses a lot of the place names of the towns out there and how we use names like Mountaintop out there in the middle of nowhere, Riverside when there’s no water anywhere in sight, and then there’s some others that really say what they mean. Sand Creek.

BJ: At the same time, you get a lot of the…it’s amazing how some of the Indian names out there are just so totally different, obviously different tribes, but you know that you get the rhythms and all that. I imagine that’s just the treasure trove for poets, the names and the staccato of some of the names and so on.

CH: Yes, right.

BJ: I wondered, too, have you traveled a lot? I know one of your books was about art and artistic ventures in poetry. One of them spoke to me. I went to Barcelona and I noticed you had one in there about Gaudi’s studio and the funny thing is, we went to his studio, and while we were walking around the park you know it’s part of the park and a little boy was riding his bike and he just collided with me and knocked me down and it just hurt and all that, and that is what I remember. But when I read your poem, I was able to retrieve a lot of that experience about having gone to his studio, because now when I, now I have something to remember.

CH: See! That’s what we want our poems to do [laughs]. That’s what we hope for.

BJ: Well, I wondered, how much does travel…do you still travel a lot?

CH: I travel a lot.

BJ: Do you find a lot of inspiration there?

CH: I do. And I don’t write when I am traveling. And I don’t take notes usually, but I kind of, when I get home, just kind of see what surfaces and over the years different things will come back. Of course, they take on new meaning with past experience. I also do a lot of traveling with medical groups and translate for them, so I go to a lot of third world countries that way, enough to do that.

BJ: Okay. Do you have any travel ones you want to share with us?

CH: I don’t believe I brought any, I don’t think I brought any. I actually kind of brought things about Oklahoma.

BJ: Well, I can understand that. I wanted to get to your days as the poet laureate. What does it mean to be…first of all, what is the poet laureate mean to Oklahoma? And then you can tell us what it means to you.

CH: You know, it’s had a rather strange history. Originally, it was just if the governor wanted to, he appointed one, and so it was very sporadic, and there were a number, and there was no particular time period, so when I first came back to Oklahoma, which was in ’71, Leslie MacGrill was the poet laureate and he was way up in his 90’s. He was this tiny little man and two of my children in second grade that I was teaching, won first and second place in the state youth poetry contest, and he came and gave them their prizes and I got to know him a little bit and he was a very interesting man. And when he died, Governor Boren, at the time, appointed Maggie Culver-Frye, who was a Cherokee lady who lived over in Claremore and she was wonderful, and she was it for years. When I knew her, she was quite old, and we

traveled around. She had bad arthritis and she didn’t drive; she would ride buses to go to schools and visit and read and she would wear these moccasins because her feet hurt too badly to wear shoes, but she still loved doing it. Well, in the year before I became poet laureate, someone decided that she couldn’t…she was in a nursing home by that time, and that they ought to have a new poet laureate, that we shouldn’t have somebody who couldn’t do, and we all said “no, no, no”, everybody loved Maggie and we’d go visit her and she was always writing poems on telephone books in her bed, even though she couldn’t get up. She still loved poetry, but at any rate, the legislature passed a law that there had to be a new poet laureate every two years and I was the first one, but that’s all the legislation said. It didn’t say how to go about it or anything, so over the years the legislation was refined and now there is pretty much one every two years and it’s gotten more and more organized, I think, but nobody really knows what the role is.

BJ: Okay.

CH: Everyone kind of makes it his own. But now, our new one is Scott Momaday, and I think his role is more defined than it used to be and he’s going to try to do a lot of things.

BJ: So, how did you react when you were told by the governor that you were…

CH: (laughs), it was really kind of funny because I knew…Jalal Khadir I believe that’s his name was editor of World Literature Today at OU, and he was the chairman of the committee, and there were people from all over the state, and they chose three and sent the three names to the governor. Well this was at the end of David Walters’ term and right before Frank Keating came in and they were arguing about a lot of posts, you know, and Walters would put someone in and Keating would take him out, and it was one of those funny things. So I got this thing in the mail that said “Congratulations on the Poet Laureate nomination” or something and I didn’t know whether that meant I was it, or whether I was out, and then, I don’t know how I found out. Nobody called me or anything, I just got this letter, and then I found out I was it, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, and then I was afraid that the other governor would throw me out (laughs). But he didn’t, I got big certificates for my wall from both of ‘em, and Betty Price at the Arts Council helped define the role somewhat and we worked from there.

BJ: So how did you…what were some of the occasions that you mentioned…I know like the British Poet Laureate is just constantly busy, every time the Queen goes somewhere there’s a new poem. How busy were you?

CH: Not too. I had to write two poems, one when Jane Alexander maybe, as the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, or the one who is head of the National Endowment for Humanities, maybe both of them were here and I wrote one for that occasion. And then when they opened the Greenwood Center, in Tulsa, the woman who got all the money for that – they had an artist do a painting of her and had me write a poem about her for the occasion of the dedication. So those were the only two I had to write.

BJ: When did your term start? Was the bombing poem written in your capacity as poet laureate?

CH: No, I just…I think, I don’t even know. Let’s see, I guess it was written during that period.

BJ: Ok. But it wasn’t a commissioned poem or anything like that.

CH: Oh no. I wrote that, I think everybody wrote something at that time, and some local people were doing an anthology of people’s written works and I turned that in. Actually, I did revise one thing, because that was not the title “Braced Against the Wind”, but they called and asked me if they could use that line for the title of the anthology. And so, then I made the title of the poem that. And then Oklahoma Today used it in their memorial magazine.

BJ: Billy Collins wrote one when he was poet laureate for the 9/11 thing and I wondered if you felt..have you ever read “Names”, the one he wrote for the bombing…er, the 9/11 attacks.

CH: Have I read his poem?

BJ: Yeah, the one called “Names”?

CH: You know, I read a lot of his things, but I don’t recall that one, so I don’t think I’ve heard him read it.

BJ: I heard, I don’t know this for sure, but I heard some place that he didn’t publish it because he didn’t want it to be commercialized or anything.

CH: That could be.

BJ: But I wondered if you had heard it or read it, if you had some sort of kinship with the experience.

CH: I guess I didn’t realize he’d done that, and again, no, I didn’t do this as poet laureate, I just did it as response.

BJ: Ok. Did you bring any from that era that you wanted to share with us, that you’d written for an occasion?

CH: I did not. Let’s see if there’s anything else. As I said, a couple of my children’s books are set in Oklahoma too. One is The Mystery of Black Mesa, which is written about out at Black Mesa. And another one, I’m Not From Neptune, is set in Oklahoma City. This one actually ends up at the old Stovall museum, before they built the new one, so, it’s kind of fun.

BJ: OK.

CH: This is just another one that’s a little more recent. I have a lot of, I have a huge long poem published in this same Southwestern American Literature called “Whirlwind”, which is about the wind and it goes on and on. I have a lot of poems about wind and this is one called “Where Nothing Waits”:

Where Nothing Waits

We do not call the wind Mariah here or anything

Do not whistle it up like the man he told off in the Yucatan

All of our trees lean northward, taking the south wind as they’re due

We wear heavier hairspray, a few build safe rooms or cellars

But mostly, we ignore it or curse it when it irritates in its constancy

The wind brings us grit from all the four corners

Sometimes we feel hopeful and put up a tent or cabana

Tether it with our hardened metals

We try to hold ourselves on this earth with railroad ties

Illusions of success are rare

We have no more toes than the historic cattle to name this thing

The lift of levitation circles, circles, knows it will carry us off

Knows we do not, cannot see it, even as it rubs the back of our necks

Even as it sends us chasing after our long lost hats

Which I guess ss up my feelings of impermanence (laughs). Nothing really lasts, and maybe I write poetry trying to make it last a little longer.

BJ: You leave it behind you, so it will last at least that long. I’ve run through my questions, except that I have one more and that is what advice do you have for young poets, or people who don’t know they are poets yet, or you know, young Oklahoma poets?

CH: Just start writing and keep writing and keep reading and find what you love and read a lot of it and memorize if you can. If you can’t, listen, even record other people’s poems and listen to them in your car. The sound gets in your head and it works without you even working at it, really.

BJ: Ok, and what would you like to share that I haven’t asked, that you…is there anything…send a message through time to our descendants who will be listening to this.

CH: Well, I think we have a wonderful legacy in Oklahoma and I don’t even think we realize it, because as I said, I came back and realized our history is so short compared to anybody else’s but it really isn’t, because way back. But we don’t hang onto things so much and that’s both a strength and a weakness. I think letting go and letting new things happen is important, and that’s some of our spirit, I think.

BJ: Well, I thank you very much for your time with us today, and we really appreciate it.

CH: Thank you, I appreciate your good questions.

BJ: Thank you.