the true keeps calm biding its story

Rusty Morrison

Selected for the 2007 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by Peter Gizzi

An extended bio by the author

 

When I decided to return to grad school in 1997, I had been a high school teacher for 19 years. My years of teaching at the secondary level were deeply rewarding, but the work was all-consuming and it left little time for any other creative activities. Though I’d been a committed poet in high school and college, I found no time for writing once I began teaching full time. During those years, I enthusiastically encouraged my students to do two things: to bring writing into every facet of their lives, and to follow their heartfelt ambitions about their futures.

In my early 40s, I began to feel the need to take my own advice—advice that I didn’t have the courage to follow in my 20s. For me, this meant facing the poet I’d always wanted to be. I started slowly: I joined a wonderful writing group, took poetry writing classes privately and through UC extension. And, rather than simply rereading my dog-eared copies of beloved poets whom I’d found in my youth and in my early college years, I began to read current, mostly innovative, writers.

Brenda Hillman’s Bright Existence and Death Tractates and Ann Lauterbach’s “The Night Sky” essays in APR are three of the revelatory reading experiences that I still remember most vividly from that time period. And these two poets’ writings, past and present, continue to be deeply important to me. I also allowed myself time to begin to read the philosophical writers whom I’d always intended to study. Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Blanchot were two of the first, and I still return to both.

In ‘97, I took the big risk and applied to the Saint Mary’s College MFA program, which I chose primarily because Brenda Hillman was teaching there. I remain enormously grateful to Brenda and to all of the teachers with whom I studied during those two years. After graduating from the program, I left behind the security of my tenure as a high school teacher, and began teaching part-time, working as a free-lance reviewer, and since 2001, I have been the co-editor and co-publisher of Omnidawn Publishing, which my husband and I began.

My first collection of poems, Whethering, won the 2004 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Forrest Gander. Most of the poems in that collection began while I was a resident at the Djerassi Artists Program in Woodside, California. I am very grateful for the gift of time that this residency gave me. I found myself writing long poem cycles for the first time in my writing life. Those cycles were influenced by my rather eclectic reading, which included George Oppen, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Maurice Merleau-Ponti. At Djerassi, which is located on the California coast, I experienced more deeply than ever before the ways in which the natural environment speaks its languages to the physical body, to the senses. I wanted to examine my physical / perceptual reading of those languages, while attempting to hold in the foreground of the poem the natural objects that most powerfully stimulated my desire to respond. I found myself coming to a deeper appreciation of the paradox of response-how every bridge I attempt to build with language creates a border, how every articulation of a sensation is a separation.

In the true keeps calm biding its story, my second book, I’ve continued to be interested in the ways that a poet uses her awareness of the separation between presence and presentation, between the real and the realized-whether that awareness comes from the recall of direct experience or from writing’s exploratory practices. I appreciate what Enrique Martinez Celaya calls “the friction between the things that happen to us and the stories we invent to make sense of them.” This friction is often a poem’s most intriguing material. How to expose it, explore it?

This brings to my mind Rosmarie Waldrop, whose work I deeply value. I’m thinking at this moment of her statement that a poem “can make the culture aware of itself, unveil hidden structures. It questions, resists.” I imagine that a concomitant benefit is that the poem can help to make the poet herself aware of hidden structures that she operates within, can help to unveil her hidden structures.

But how to come to such awareness, to create a poetic space in which this work might be done? When I am struggling to answer that question, I find myself returning to Robert Duncan—his poems and his writings on poetics, his apprehensions and appraisals of what happens to language brought to bear upon what he calls the “troubling plentitude of experience” and its “gaps.” In his essay “Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” Duncan quotes Thomas Carlyle, saying “See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it.” Reading Duncan, I am reminded to look in order to hear, and to hear in order to see, as I follow in the poem’s motion-the surprising shifts of its sonic connections and interrelations—a music taking me beyond what I had previously perceived as the limits of my ear’s and eye’s aptitude.