Interview with Joseph Donahue_____________________________________
This interview (click here for audio) originally took place on the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, hosted by Leonard Schwartz on KAOS 89.3FM, Olympia, Washington. It was transcribed and adopted for print by Carl Kelleher.
Leonard Schwartz: Joseph Donahue is the author of a number of very important collections of poetry, including Before Creation, Monitions of the Approach, World Well Broken, Terra Lucida, and most recently Incidental Eclipse, published in 2003 by Talisman House. Of Incidental Eclipse John Ashbery has written, "This sequence confirms Donahue as one of the major American poets of this time." I think Ashbery is absolutely right. Joe, welcome.
Joseph Donahue: Thank you very much.
LS : Let's go right to the new book Incidental Eclipse . Could you say a little bit about that--the title, and what distinguishes the writing in this book?
JD : Well, this book gathers writing from about a nine-year period, from '91 to about 2000. I suppose one thing that distinguishes it is that it began as a single poem which then broke into smaller sections, which means that there is an underlying--I would like to think, anyway--investigation going on, or curiosity or inquiry that works its way through each of the poems. The poems tend to be on the longish side; they're meditative, each one is a couple of pages.
LS : Longish meditations… since "Desire," your long poem in Before Creation , I've thought of as you a poet who is able to explore that meditative long poem very effectively. You spoke of an underlying curiosity that runs through the poems. Could that be articulated apart from the poems, or should we go right to a reading of the book?
JD : The original title was Areas of Elsewhere . That fell by the wayside, but there's a sense in each of the poems that they attempt to inhabit a particular landscape with a certain kind of deliberateness and intensity, and to focus on moments of intersection between different worlds—a question or inquiry being about the connection between the here and the beyond, which is a title of one of the poems about midway though the book.
LS : There is that remarkable poem, "Here/Beyond." I wonder if you could read it to us?
JD : Yes, for sure...As I mentioned, there are a number of landscapes featured, or backdrops to these poems, and this one is in fact set in the Pacific Northwest. So here it is.
Here / Beyond
The Eden exhibit's closed today--
All those illustrations for Paradise Lost
done by a lunatic at the end of the last centurynote the erratic sense of scale...
Sonic bits of what's ahead reach you
as across the spacious interiora crystalline mansion, or a rubble lot
where cops say, get out of here,
(and this your old school playground).First night here/beyond
Red brick in wreckage dust.
The convent wall still standing.
You're ecstatic. In an instant your
twin will arrive, will get all this...Pure white mist from a heated pool.
Rectangles, a green inside a white one,
luminous and empty, but for the shallows
where a boy takes a swimming lesson.Anxious queries, in the low mist, sapphire
glow and a woman, hip-deep, coaxing him.He's afraid of floating on his back.
Head tilting, arms out, he begins to drift.
He looks up at the pale blue hole in the sky
through which gold, purple and pink are pouring...The second night, a world tossed
like a bloodied rag on the seat of a bus...Think of the destruction of the temple,
whispers your guide, the fruit of that ruin.Without that calamity thought would not exist .
You'd have only pure nothing in your head.
Then she points to the stars visible through
a window in the ceiling of the plane...The third night dies: a love letter,
a blue blur pinched from a gutter like
a photo lifted from the fluid tray--
I am looking out at flowers
on an apple tree , the lost one
writes, to one far-off, the one left
from when this was an orchard ...On the forth night, Enoch,
you unlock the archive-of-what-is.
You read the book mottled with myrrh--Blood covers me. The blade,
spousal, keeps working my back,
shoulders & neck. I'm at my task,washing dinner plates. The dream
opens my body to the night air.Warm water rushing from the tap.
In the window over the sink: stars.
Air & light sweeping through me.My blood evaporating.
Some vast circulatory joy
completing itself in my veins...Next night, the angel's jibe
would harry the glitter from the dew
in a field with a dozen gulls & one crow.
Meanwhile, the hint of a whirlwind--
far end of the street where no
prophet was last seen...Night, a night of sunlight.
Old worlds, new puzzle
from a museum gift shop.
The Aegean glows. Shrines
and empires rise. A lost library.
Then the renaissance stalls.
The mother says to the
children, there on a patch
of sunlit carpet: We have to
think, if we can't find a piece
now, we've done something wrong ...Sixth arc of the spirit. A re-route.
Houses dark. Light in a back window.
Neon-ringed signs. Accountant. Masseuse.
Dealers in guns, coins, cards. Alarm glow
in locked shops. South of the airport,
devotees in trailers, dumped by
aliens in a wet hell. Truck parts
on lots, apocalyptic decals,
drums, cylinders, squares of
plywood, rotting in stacks.
These bits stare out
Like dumbstruck skulls
on a mortuary totem pole...The complete is prior to
the incomplete. But in coming
to be, the incomplete is
temporarily prior to the complete ...
LS : Thank you Joe, that's a remarkable poem. The “landscape” seems to me to be that of the Apocryphal literature, the Book of Enoch and various alternative versions of what scriptures might mean. But you say it's a Pacific Northwest landscape. We're here in the Pacific Northwest, and I know you've lived in Seattle for quite a few years. Could you say a little bit about that dimension of the poem?
JD : Well, when I moved to Seattle, where as you said I lived for a few years, I started to brood upon Stevens's notion that every region has it's mythology, and I was asking myself what is the mythology for me of the Pacific Northwest. I mean, what is a mythology I can work with. And I suppose it was only the influence of David Lynch and--what was it--Twin Peaks--
LS : Ah ha...
JD :--Which was on in the 90's, which brought to mind this conjunction of the here and beyond, in terms of the Pacific Northwest as Seattle and the Apocalypse.
Then one thinks about--oh, as I was getting to know the area people would mention things out of hand, like the fact that the first flying saucer was said to have been sighted somewhere above Tacoma in the late Forties. And people would clue me in to various kinds of cultic activity in the stretch between Seattle and Tacoma and south of the airport, which is mentioned in the poem. So I think from being in Seattle then and coming upon books of Apocryphal, visionary writings, it just seemed of a piece.
LS : Makes sense, now that you say it. We are on the edge of something here; I thought we were on the edge of the ocean, but it could be the edge of--
JD : Far more...
LS : Here and beyond, as you put it in the poem.
Well, that's really interesting. I know wherever you've written--you've lived in New York for many years, and you were born in Texas--you've made that attempt to locate if not the mythic center, at least a mythic source in a particular landscape or region.
JD : Yes.
LS : How's North Carolina coming along?
JD : Well...It's a challenge to the imagination. But I'm getting there. I take heed. There's a line in the Pisan Cantos, which I've not really found anyone around here who will fess up to the real meaning of. It says something like "Lucifer fell in North Carolina in 1946." This intrigues me. I wonder what that means for a state so given over to the forces of tobacco--
LS : I see--
JD : There're all sorts of occult connections that might be possible here, but it's still in process.
LS : Much to cultivate, like the tobacco itself…
Joe, I wondered if we could go further into the book. There's a remarkable poem there entitled "Aria Nowhere," perhaps my favorite in the book. I wondered if you could read that, or say something about it and then read "Aria Nowhere."
JD : Sure. I think I will just say about it what the subtitle says, which is that it's in memory of my mother.
Aria Nowhere
in memory of my mother
Where are you?
That's what the wind says
as it scatters blossoms over the earth.
The face I long to look upon has disappeared,
that's what the field flowers say
at the cusp of their color.Without that voice to call me
I am motionless, says the deer
as evening lifts over the mountain.
Where is the one who will sit beside me
in my sickness, says the child in his room.
Who will share this with me, says one
stuck sad amid the feasting.
Where are the dry twigs
and scraps of paper, says
the uncreated fire on behalf of
which the match is struck.Weeds range into the garden.
The poison languishes in the shed,
and the bottles of polish and cleaning fluid.
Chemicals, inert. No catalyst breaks the quiet.
The house is empty, and all the rooms of the house.
Where is the one who will set me in the earth,
says the tomato plant in the paper cup.
And where is the grave we are
bunched and waiting for, say
the flowers on the table.
Where are my mourners,
says the body in the coffin
in the parlor at night.The water under the dock
in front of the well-lit warehouse
at the other end of the continent
asks, where is the current that
once brought news from far away?
And where is the trumpet of judgment,
say the hills and gullies of the Holy Land.
And the nurse who stood all night
beside the deathbed
feels the heat of the sun
face to the sky, lying on a beach,
on a vacation, a thousand miles away.
And in places around the world the root
seeks nourishment, but the ground
has turned against it.
And the air cries out, beaten
by the wings of birds. Radio bands
have been cleansed of notes and chatter.
There is nothing to hear but the final silence,
reaching ever further below the crust of the earth,
where the tremor cannot find the fault
and passes deeper into the stone.
And the star collapsing at the fringe of time
calls to the last light that will
ever escape it,
you belong inside of me,
there will never be a home
for you anywhere else. But the light
ignores the cry of the star and speeds on...I fly up a mountain
looking for you, says one of
the bewitched children in a dream.
But fog covers the peak, the inlet,
the islands, nothing can be seen today.
All I take away is the cool dampening
of my clothes. And the falling snow
asks where is the mountainside
promised by the clouds.
And the gold sear
on the high white fields
will never achieve its glitter.
Where are the beautiful tresses
and the mischief of the wind that only
I could quell, asks the hairbrush on the table.
A pillow welling with its blue oriental silks
tipped with gold frays, glows in the mild sunlight,
asking, where is the grieving face
that will press against my emblems?
And in a variety of fires around the world
burning seems bewildered by the lack of smoke.
The smoke seems confused by the death
of the wind. The wind lies quiet,
unconsoled by the galaxies
glittering beyond it.I sent the birds to find you,
says the gold tree in a fairy tale.
The unripe plum on a green branch
that cannot choose within itself a color
luscious enough for the season
has heard nothing of you.
The newborn goat grazing
amid the peaceful flock
has seen nothing of you.
The fish at the bottom of the lake
in the shadows under the bright reef
offers no details. Ashes in the jetstream
that rings the planet report no memory of you.
It seems the one I want to speak to
has not been noticed anywhere.
Perhaps the only hope that can exist
is the hope that remains unknown, says
the hot spring bubbling through the night.
And for one our each night anyone
can still be healed, but no one
knows about it. The halt are asleep.
The lame drift off. The crippled,
hauled from their rack, have been
washed, fed, and sedated.The dead one appears
but the living have fallen asleep.
The dead one fades, truths unsaid.
Up the street, a hammer strikes a nail,
and in the whole valley, in the whole
regency of midsummer splendor
there is only one sound,
a hammer striking a nail.
How pointless altars are now.
Now the entire earth is a single altar,
say the mountains rising across the water.
The days are shortening.
Ice fills the channels.
The coat of the fox turns white.
The nesting grounds are blown away.
The foragers depart, the sun is defeated.
All's quiet as the ocean floor
where the wreck lies.
And the storm wanders,
asking, where is the land?
And where are the apples,
so many last year, now so few,
the child asks, white smoke trailing
into a stormy sky or a dome
the color of a light-filled sky
and the sky lies broken
into bits above it.
LS : Joe, that's such a remarkable poem. A couple of things I want to say there. It seems to me you have this unique capacity for entering into the invisible and finding color there. The poem is entering into that which cannot be said, into a place of non-being, and yet as in many of your poems it brims with color. Could you say a little bit about your sense of color and how you think you might come by it?
JD : That's very interesting. It's something I on one hand have always been aware of; I've responded to it in other poets--one thinks of Lorca's writing, and early on I was reading that. I don't have a grand theory of color, but it's interesting that you connect it with the notion of the invisible: color on one hand heightening the sense of the visible, but also color does what?--It can imbue things with a not-quite-natural aura, it can suggest a kind of symbolic quality, as well as giving a kind of mood or emotional tone that maybe suggests that the way one approaches the invisible is by transforming the visible into parables or symbols, or giving it some kind of hidden meaning. So that we have the feeling of the closeness of the invisible even as we experience a kind of exalted sense of the visible.
LS : Also, the sense that color is maybe some transitional or intermediary phase, or limbo: if my eyes are open I am seeing objects, if I am trying to imagine non-being I am in a place of spatial vacuity, but if I close my eyes, in hypnogogic vision, I will still see color, flashes of color. Maybe there is a way in which color is the purgatory between these two realms that you, as a very Catholic poet, seem to have constructed, that of the inferno of vision and the paradise of the invisible. Does that make any sense or am I just whistling up a Tree of my own invention?
JD : Well, I'd like to think about it. But it's curious to think of color. I suppose in terms of painting, that it's sometimes is seen as in contrast to perceiving shape. One thinks of cubist paintings as opposed to Matisse's paintings, this sense of the colorist's world being either at odds or in some kind of other category than works which focus on shape. So that the color, the fact that one closes one's eyes and sees color in some way—it's a physical property, but it also is endless. That it is unbounded, or is potentially unbounded…
LS : I was just looking at a passage in "Aria Nowhere." You write: “I sent the birds to find you,/ says the gold tree in a fairy tale./ The unripe plum on a green branch/ that cannot choose within itself a color/ luscious enough for the season/ has heard nothing of you.” It seems to me there you are also very grounded in the particular, but there are so many shades of green there, almost unstated, that we really have to think carefully about shadings. And that's—that's a gift.
JD : Well really Leonard if we're talking about shades of green what you have to do is live through a few Pacific Northwest winter seasons. The tremendous bursts of foliage, not just the flowering, but also this sense of greenery, which is all around, particularly in the Seattle area.
LS : Olympia's even greener: you see I'm already getting proud
There's another aspect to this as well. I noticed that there's a poem in your new book Incidental Eclipse entitled "Targets Mongolia" --which is an intriguing title— after a painting by Randy Hayes. I wondered if you could read that poem for us, but also say something about the relationship between the poem to that painting or that painter.
JD : OK, for sure. Randy Hayes is a terrific painter who lives in Seattle that I got to know when I was living there. I think the best parts of this poem in many ways are simply transcribing things he's done in his paintings, which incorporate a great deal of photography. What they do in short is, he develops a grid of let's say fifty or sixty photographs, develops them right on to the canvas in black and white, then paints another image over that grid. The density of the paint controls how much of the photo behind it we can see. In some cases the painting is very textured and we see nothing of the photos on the underlying canvas; in other places the painting is quite thin, so one gets this kind of ghostly feeling of—well, this is very interesting—of another world permeating the world of color. Or a world of shapes or of histories. He's traveled a lot and takes photos of these ancient ruins and landscapes, and juxtaposes them with the contemporary world of the country he's traveling in. This poem is really an attempt to think and feel my way through one of his images.
Targets, Mongolia
after a painting by Randy Hayes
A world dipped in dye, in solar fire, yellow and gold, threaded with orange. On or in that world, an image denying that light. A field in Mongolia. Archery targets on a dry plain, askew, tilted toward the sky.
*
The sky flows pink and orange, over the earth-colored cloud rim and the low, distant hills. Behind the targets, a horizon slab, greenish gray. Then wet streaks and a sullen glow, a sodden hollow, a glint of copper in the terrain. Cloud shadows, closing in or blowing away. One cloud's a ravine of white, a fray of fire.
*
When translucence arrives, all's over. Some unseen arm seems about to sweep the world away. Paintspills, a shawl. The folds are opening. A revelatory gesture. Could be a dancer in India, a prostitute in Milan, a transvestite in Seattle…
*
But the end, here, should be “out there.” Take the targets for an ultimate outpost, a sky monitor hidden at the quietest edge of the world. Presume recurrence in the scattering from a quadrant, a Creation whose initial light showers the earth only now. Prove as possible, if only for yourself, what Plotinus said: A word softly spoken can influence a distant object, and attain a hearing from what is vastly remote in space .
*
Cloud, sky, mountain, plain, all dissolve into a monk's bed, a row of gold masks, a wrecked temple. The pain clears. The photos, printed on the canvas, dipped in dye, slowly stand out: an old tomb. Artisans making statues of the Buddha. Men with a monkey on the way to a festival. Camels, motorcycles, interiors of a dilapidated hotel. Atavistic figurines from an overtaken faith. The edge of a roof. A train track or tread. A necklace from the grave of a prince and his consort…
*
The targets are tilted back. The arrows must arc. The archer must be, have been, far. One feels the sun warming his back. Sees a storm steal his aim as he shoots. Sees darkness scattering before him, with one shot…
*
Perhaps this was a training camp for low-tech terrorists. Or trash from a festival. The targets angle away from each other. No solo marksman. But the hint of fellowship darkens the mood. If once there were two, they could only be far apart. Now and then dust would cloud that innermost circle. Each assassin-to-be waits for the wind to drop.
*
Could be the Orphic cults began in this field. Their renunciations, a flood filling the well of Western thought. Could be their devotion persists. Violent one, you saved the Trojans for a while, then destroyed them. Arrows of your light are falling through the clouds.
*
Or beams from lost galaxies. Or scraps of the first flash. These targets, propped in an infinite field, could be the exact end of all that light. Meanwhile, there is an unearthed tomb behind the bull's eye. A dead queen, her universe of jewels…
LS : You've been listening to Joseph Donahue read "Targets, Mongolia" from Incidental Eclipse , published by Talisman House press, 2003. Really an interesting piece. Prose poem—and I think that sense of color is there as well.
I've never been to Mongolia; I've been to Inner Mongolia, which is an autonomous region or semi-autonomous region controlled by China. The poem does take me to that place in some interesting way, even though you're basically reading a painting there, yes?
JD : Right. Reading a painting which is based on photographs of—the central image is of these two targets in a field but on the canvas behind the paint are dozens and dozens of photographs taken while the painter was touring Mongolia. So you and he may have crossed some of the same dusty trails.
LS : Randy Hayes, I'll have to look for his paintings as well.
JD : Yes.
LS : Your book Incidental Eclipse is wonderful. Anything about what you're working on now?
JD : Well, I'm working on what now seems to be a longish poem, maybe book length; although the minute I say that means it will probably collapse into a sequence of small unrelated poems. At the moment I'm trying to, I think, respond to this southern landscape in some way and along the same lines.
LS : Well, we'll have to stay in touch. We get together only when we do poetry readings in New York, in the spring and in D.C. before that. So I'm curious to see what diabolical, luciferian landscapes North Carolina and Ezra Pound conjure up for you.
JD : Well who knows, after this next election it may get even darker.
LS : God, don't say that. Not that. Joe, it's been great and we'll have to have you back soon.
JD : OK.
LS : Pleasure.
You've been listening to Cross-Cultural Poetics. This is your host Leonard Schwartz. ‘Til next time.
[ see also ]
Two Poems by Joseph Donahue
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