July 2023

Caesura Presents…Donna Spruijt-Metz

Donna Spruijt-Metz is a poet, a psychology professor, and a recent MacDowell Fellow. Her first career was as a classical flutist. She also translates Dutch poetry to English. Her poetry and translations appear in Copper Nickel, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, The Tahoma Literary Review, The Inflectionist Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks are Slippery Surfaces (Finishing Line Press), And Haunt the World (a collaboration with Flower Conroy, Ghost City Press), and Dear Ghost, (winner of the 2023 Editor’s Prize at Harbor Review). Camille Dungy (Orion Magazine) chose her full length General Release from the Beginning of the World (January 2023, Free Verse Editions) as one of the 14 Recommended Poetry Collections for Winter 2022.

Website:  https://www.donnasmetz.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Donnasmetz

Poetry as Survival Technique

 

John:
Congratulations on the publication of General Release from the Beginning of the World! It’s such a beautiful, intimate, moving, yet emotionally troubling work. There’s so much tenderness and longing in every line, so much reaching back toward the past, pushing yourself toward an uncertain future, and a struggle to remain inspired by the present. If I could condense all your various, potent themes into a single line, I’d say you’re trying to discover (or maybe rediscover) the language to define “home,” be it familial, religious, and wholly internal. Do you find that an accurate impression? Can you tell me about how where you came from impacts your need to write (and what you write about)?

Donna:

Thanks, John, for your kind words. You ask me, I think, if I am ‘having a hard time finding my way home’—and that seems about right to me—I used to play the Stevie Windward/Blind Faith song Can’t Find My Way Home over and over again when I was alone. There is so much I could say about ‘where I came from’—but one thing is for sure, it wasn’t ‘home’—at least not as I understand that word now. Home, to me, is a place of discomfort yet acceptance, a safe place to wrestle with all that is Holy (however I define that, which is various, and whatever that means to you, the reader). Home is indeed something I am still trying to find. But where I came from informs my work so deeply that I think that may be the reason that I fled poetry for so many decades.

I had written poetry on and off all my life, but I don’t think I really turned to face it until about 2013, my first summer at Bread Loaf. Poetry, for me, demands honesty. And I didn’t grow up with honesty—I grew up with deception. There is so much I don’t know about what went on in my life, and so much that I suppressed—I am sure I am no different than so many others in that. But to write poetry, I had to turn towards the deceptions I had built my life on, open my arms, and let whatever truth I could find enter me. And underneath that there are always other truths. There are so many things I was, and still am, afraid to know. The trick remains finding the thread that leads me there and then not to drop that thread no matter how terrified I am. This is so uncomfortable. And so slow—so much ‘throat clearing’ goes on before I can keep my eyes open long enough to get somewhere that feels true.

One other thing that poetry demands, and again this is only for me, is that I wrestle with what is Holy—with God, or the Goddess, or the Shekhinah in my own faith tradition. Those visits come when they come, and the only thing I can do is try to keep myself fit for it, present. A very hard task. I am immanently distractable. I so admire poets like Ada Limón—she really knows how to keep herself present. I am a somnambulist reconstructing family, I am a new-fangled metaphysician trying to enter my faith fully, on my own terms.

 John:

I love how you say poetry demands that we wrestle with certain essential things in our lives. There’s so much uncertainty in us all, exemplified perfectly in your poem “Doppler Effect,” which begins with:

What does it mean, to turn?    Turn towards,
turn away, turn tail,

turn the wood       on a lathe,            make it beautiful

And that last line, I believe, speaks for all creative people. We’re trying to make our fears and uncertainties “beautiful.” How does poetry help you make things, if not more certain, more beautiful?

Donna:

Hard question! I guess we first have to define our terms. What is meant, here, by ‘beautiful’? By ‘beauty’? Beauty is at the center of many raging debates in every corner of the art and design worlds—and all of these debates seem to assume that beauty is ‘only’ subjective (thus not ‘real’) or that beauty is completely objective (something is measurably beautiful or not). But beauty is not fully located in the observer, nor is it fully located in the observed. Beauty is intersubjective—something shared by people, not something that sets us apart. To write a poem that can create a shared aesthetic experience, one of beauty—if only for a moment—makes the world more livable. If I can fashion my fears and uncertainties into something beautiful, which is to say, something with a caring resonance, it paves the way to intersubjective experiences, mutual understanding, a spark of recognition, a sense of connection. To paraphrase Lynda Barry: ‘We don’t create [art] to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.’

John:

“A caring resonance.” I’d say that applies to this collection perfectly. You even begin the poem “Pebbles along the Labyrinth” with the line:

I listen for mercy—

Creatively and/or personally, where do you listen to (and perhaps discover) your mercy? Especially given your spiritual themes, do you feel poetry is a kind of striving toward personal or societal mercy?

Donna:

Oh yes, poetry, for me at least, is a survival technique. Writing poetry is how I search for mercy. It is a listening for whatever mercy is on offer. But I am not always (or maybe not often) a ‘good’ listener.  I flicker in and out of it, I forever have one ear cocked towards something else—something beyond. I am pawing through the rubble of my days, trying to piece together the fragments, make sense of the partial signals. And poetry goes beyond being a ‘listening’. For me, it is also a dialogue—I am trying to set up a dialogue with—with what? With whatever has the power to confer mercy—holiness? the big G? the Name? The spirit? Maybe it is the earth? The conversation is sometimes irreverent. But I think that is OK. It has to be. I can’t do it otherwise. I have questions.

John:

I often describe poetry as a series of conversations too: between the poet and reader, between words and their varied meanings and implications, between imagery and the real world our imagery represents. And your book starts all these conversations, and others, including, as you say in the poem “The Good Entreaty,” between “the territory of darkness” and “the territory of light.” There’s the constant push and pull of darkness and light in your poems, be it the human or spiritual worlds. There’s a deep striving for a (perhaps impossible) balance in your work. What are your thoughts on how light and darkness weave throughout the collection?

Donna:

The Maariv Aravim prayer (said right before the Shema at evening prayers) describes God as the being who ‘weaves evening’ or ‘evenings evening’, who “rolls light away from darkness, and darkness from light.” So, to me, light and dark seem a part of each other, one is rolled away to make room for the other, always in flux. This seems true in the ‘human’ world as well as the ‘spiritual’ world (which also seem part of each other, waxing and waning, one and then the other more ‘visible’). And so it is in the making of poetry, too. Sometimes we long for the ‘light’ (visibility, sun, warmth—or grace, hope, strength, revelation). But with every morning there is the promise of losing the light again. And with every night, there is the promise of morning. This is the beautiful, terrifying cycle of it. In John Donne’s homilies, he talks about being brought out of ‘darkness’ (i.e. poverty, ignorance, blindness of eyes and spirit, even sin). Yet when he wants to be wholeheartedly fixed in the contemplation of God, detached from any material and even spiritual consolation, he seeks darkness. So in my poetry, it’s not exactly balance I am seeking, but peace with the cycle—or maybe, agility within the cycle. Personally, I resonate with Donne’s meanings of darkness. At night, in the dark (all those meanings of darkness), I am more vulnerable—more able to contemplate ‘holiness’—more able to hear a poem when it comes for me—in a darkened room, at night, candles lit. I am a nighttime poet, I’m afraid, but I work joyously with the memories of light.

John:

Thank you for such a beautifully compelling answer! Your reference to Donne’s bringing us out of “darkness” inspired this next question. How does poetry affect and effect you emotionally? Does it help pull you out from some inner darkness? Or, the reverse, does it allow you to explore that inner darkness in a safe environment, perhaps with a sense of catharsis? Or perhaps both simultaneously?

Donna: 

I admit to going down a rabbit hole trying to sort the difference between affect and effect. I love words. And in my science world, these two are particularly charged. Both words can be nouns or verbs, both words have very distinct meanings. Many a university writing center has tried to sort this for their students. Here’s a good one. https://www.touro.edu/departments/writing-center/tutorials/affect-or-effect/ . Meanwhile I am just going to go with something akin to ‘impact’ – or could be ‘infiltrate’ or maybe even ‘infuse’?

Reading other people’s poetry can really pull me out when I am feeling dark. But absolutely not all poetry. Carl Phillips is one of the poets I can turn to when I am lost in darkness. His poetry comes alongside, as it were—sits with me—a companion. Another is Dana Levin. She makes me feel much less insane—I can relax into her artistic freedom and daring. And Sappho, her divine fragments—aren’t we all divine fragments? And Hans Lodeizen, my favorite Dutch poet, because he was such an outsider and such a brilliant, heartfelt craftsman, and it is so healing to be in conversation with his work.

Writing poetry—just the process of it, not necessarily the product—absolutely wrests me from darkness. Whether I am trying to write, and nothing comes of it, or whether I am ‘in the heat of some truthful tears’ as Allen Ginsberg called his clearest moments in his 1966 Paris Review interview, any sinking into the process brings me deep relief. It is like one giant shedding of the day, of the world and her slow demise, of myself, the noise of it, the spiritual noise of beings— including my dogs—every being is noisy. Writing quiets it, brings the noise down to a manageable level. It is amazing to me how I struggle sometimes to find the time and then make myself sit for it, when it is so lifesaving. People are such strange beings.

I love the last part of your question: “does [writing] allow you to explore that inner darkness in a safe environment.” There is nothing safe, as far as I am concerned, in writing poetry. It isn’t for the faint of heart—I know because for decades I was too faint of heart to pick up the pen again. But it is, for me, the only path to understanding—sometimes brutally and sometimes gently confrontational, cathartic when I can find my way into the honest truth of it—which shifts and shifts. ‘Truth,’ I think, is dynamic, it changes over time—which is probably why some of us write about the same thing again and again. We are working our way towards the next level or the new truth.

John:

Thank you for such a vulnerable answer, a poet’s answer. For my final question, let’s lighten things up a bit.

Apart from creativity, what fills your life with joy, with meaning? And can you say one thing about yourself that might surprise us?

Donna:

I think everything we do is creative—listening to music, making dinner, parenting—it all requires imagination and creativity. My daughter, husband, dogs, friends, faith traditions, all of this can fill my life with joy (or frustration!). For the second part of your question, I drew a blank so I asked my daughter. She made the following (hilarious) list. Take your pick!

1)    You were a bass player in a rock band that once played cover for Van Morrison

2)    You lived on a commune and made fantastic strawberry shortcake

3)    You still do not ride a bike despite living 20+ years in Holland

4)    You can drink your daughter under the table four times over

5)    You pioneered the use of mobile health technology in intervening in childhood obesity.

Thank you, John, for your insightful questions, and for listening.