By Karen Halvorsen Schreck

Beauty might save the world. At least it might be our best shot. Read any poem by Anya Krugovoy Silver, and you may find yourself thinking along these lines. Exquisitely crafted, laced with breathtaking imagery and musical language, intimate, attentive, fearless, and direct—Silver’s work ultimately arcs toward hope. But bear in mind: her vision isn’t starry-eyed or head in the clouds. Nope. In Silver’s poetry, readers are as likely to find themselves on the dark side of the moon or a fairy tale, as they are at a chemo clinic or an altar rail, in some far-flung city (Budapest, say) or the local Walgreen’s.

Silver is a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry (2018). She has published four books of poetry, most recently From Nothing (Louisiana State University Press, 2016) and Second Bloom (Cascade Press, 2018).  She has been published in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2016. She teaches English at Mercer University and lives in downtown Macon, Georgia, with her husband and son. She and I have built a friendship over the last couple of years, thanks to the wonders of social media. We finally met in person this past April, at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College. We began this conversation over dinner there, and continued it by email in the weeks that followed.

Karen Halvorsen Schreck: Anya, let’s talk Mother Tongue. it’s my understanding that English is your third language, preceded by Russian and German. How did the multi-lingual nature of your childhood influence your relationship to the spoken and written word, your genesis and development as a poet?

Anya Krugovoy Silver: I love the phrase “mother tongue.” German Jewish poet Rose Ausländer writes in the poem “Motherland,” “I live in my Mother-land–/Word.” A poet friend of mine calls poetry his mother tongue. I think that as a result of being raised bilingually, in Russian and German, before learning English, language itself is my mother tongue. Hearing so many words and sounds, and translating them from one language to another, attracted me at an early age to language as a medium of expression and communication. I have a very persistent memory of listening to a group of women sitting together, sewing, and switching back and forth between Russian, German, and English. They seemed very magic to me at the time, women who were secretly mythical. I was sitting on the floor, listening to them. What I learned was both love for the specificity of language, the way Russian sounds different than English, for example, but also the way that words can convey and translate personal experience to people of all backgrounds. Of course, this whole process was basically subconscious.

KHS: What a gorgeous memory, though—the three fates of language, weaving poetry as destiny into the web of a life. (If I may be so bold.)

Perhaps related to this (and given our current political context, and the fact that #45 can’t craft or seem to complete a coherent sentence):

In one of our conversations, you mentioned, almost as an aside, that you have no truck with inaccessible poetry, and cited the New Yorker as a publication inclined to feature such work. I wonder if some might say, in response, “Well, that reader simply isn’t working hard enough.” What’s your reply to this? Do you believe poets have a certain responsibility to readers, in terms of directness and clarity? If so, do you write with a certain audience or reader in mind, one who keeps you honest, so to speak?

AKS: Well, first of all, I would say that Kevin Young, who started editing the magazine in 2017, has done a tremendous job at making poetry relevant. Of course, he’s a great writer, himself. I realize that poetry is a wide tent and that poets need to write the kinds of poetry that express their own personal vision. While I don’t normally like extremely experimental or avant-garde poetry, that poetry is an expression, hopefully, of its authors’ visions. But in the case of my work, I want my poetry to be direct and clear. I think of my audience very intentionally as ordinary readers, that is, people who enjoy reading and are up to a challenge, but might not read a lot of poetry. I imagine that my reader could be somebody with a trauma who wants to hear his or her life made known in poetry. Or, as someone who writes about religious faith, I imagine my reader as somebody who has considered the possibility of God. I don’t mean that I write that person’s experience, but that I write for that person’s experience. I never want my poetry to sound pretentious or purposefully opaque, though I don’t want it to sound simplistic or linguistically flat, either. I do think that there are elements of the poetry establishment, insofar as there is one, that tend to value experimentation and technical innovation over communication, which I don’t.

So, in answer to your question, I would say that poets have primarily a responsibility to their craft and vocation, but that for me, that vocation consists of speaking to non-poets and people outside the circle of other poets with degrees in creative writing. I’ll go so far as to say that if eight out of ten ordinary people can’t hold onto something significant in a poem, then the poem is probably not working hard enough, not the readers.

KHS: You’ve got me thinking about the communal story-telling origins of poetry-making, Anya—us around a fire, bright flames beating back the night. Versus: us illuminated by theory (and florescent lights) in the hothouse environment of an academic workshop . . . though I do love a good workshop).

Still . . . I guess I continue to have a lot of questions about achieving, or at least trying to achieve, communication and connection across boundaries and differences through art. Recently on your Instagram account (of which I’m a big fan) you posted a clip of Childish Gambino singing “This is America.” You wrote that you couldn’t stop watching and interpreting the video, but then added you’d refrain from saying too much; you wanted to know what the African-American professors you know thought about it all.

My question is: what is the role of a white writer when it comes to listening to others and having a voice today? We’ve got #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, Frances McDormand asking for inclusion riders at the Academy Awards, etc., so it seems like change is in the works. But how do you think we are doing, really, in terms of awareness and opportunity in the arts? Are there equitable exchanges, and if so, where do you see these occurring? Are the divides of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and age in any specific real way beginning to crumble? How?

AKS: It’s funny that you would mention the Childish Gambino video, which is brilliant, because a white comedian named Nicole Arbour just released a parody/homage (?) video called “This is America: Women’s Edit,” in which she sings about legitimate crises in women’s lives, such as rape and sexual objectification. But my goodness, it’s cringingly embarrassing to watch a blonde woman mimicking a video and song about violence against African Americans and using that vision for her own purposes. It’s a form of minstrelsy. As writers and artists, I think it’s fantastic to borrow from each other and be inspired by each other. I am not of the mind that an artist “should” write only about his/her life experience and is incapable of writing from an entirely different perspective. However, it’s not okay to deny the specificity of someone’s art and experience by simply recycling it. Arbour’s video was offensive and not clever.

It seems to me, superficially, that poetry has opened itself up to more diverse voices in terms of race, gender and sexualities, in that a lot of poets are writing from historically marginalized spaces about their identities. Certainly, I think that women are fairly well represented in terms of who is being published and rewarded with prizes and recognition. But on the other hand, who is reading these poets? Are their books available in book stores? Are the books affordable? If the work is only available to a small number of people, then poetry remains irrelevant. Books need to be more plentiful, cheaper, more easily available, more widely reviewed, more widely sold. And as for the writing itself, I think it’s fair to ask ourselves honestly to whom it’s speaking. If I write a poem that tries to say something about being a woman, or violence, or God, or war, then I want my audience to be able to climb inside that poem, not feel shut out by it.

And since I mentioned God, I would like religious poetry to be more openly welcomed and recognized by the academy and institutions with cultural capital. I would also like to see more middle aged poets published who were not already well-known when they were young. Many of my favorite poets are those who keep publishing book after book of excellent work that goes largely unrecognized by prestigious journals, awards, etc.

KHS: Who are some of those poets? I’d love to hear your shout-out.

AKS: So many, really, but I would single out Barbara Crooker, Malena Mörling, Joyce Sutphen, Patricia Spears Jones, and Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. I’d like for there to be splashy, flashy magazines with their pictures on the covers, and perhaps postcards with their poems on them. I’d like for their books to be announced with music and delicious things to eat.

KHS: Anya, you live with stage four breast cancer, and I believe there are those who call you “the breast cancer poet.” Do you identify yourself as such? How does the qualification of “stage four” impact this? I’ve read that you’ve said breast cancer is your “flood subject,” a term originally used by Emily Dickinson, (although to be honest, I can’t remember if Dickinson distinguished one of her own subjects in this way). Is this still true?

AKS: Unfortunately, as long as I have cancer (which will be always), I’ll continue to write about it. I feel a deep calling to write about cancer because I think I’m able to do so well. I’m not an effective activist in terms of raising money or lobbying Congress for health care reform, so poetry is my contribution to making sick people visible and to representing them as whole people.

I absolutely reject myself as a “breast cancer poet.” I am not my disease. I am a complete person with a complete life. Having cancer doesn’t make one incapable of joy and wonder, and it doesn’t preclude loving food, wanting to have sex, worshipping God, and parenting children. All of us are dying, but healthy people tend to forget that. Having cancer has made me more aware of mortality and has forced me to encounter that terror. So I write about that, too. Emily Dickinson called death her flood subject, but to reduce Dickinson to a “death poet” would obviously be ridiculous.

KHS: Indeed, it would. And as Dickinson wrote about death as if no one had ever written about it before, how do you go about exorcising stereotypical language and stultifying metaphors concerning illness and disease from your work? My mother died from breast cancer when I was fourteen, and when I finally read Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor” as an adult, I was devastated, feeling that those around her, including myself, had spoken her into the shame she clearly carried throughout her illness. How do you suggest we shape language in the face of chronic suffering, so that our words will do no further harm?

AKS: I am so sorry about your mother. I haven’t experienced mother loss, and the idea of not experiencing it is one of the only positive outcomes of dying young. Isn’t that morbid? Sontag’s essay is foundational to me, though I didn’t understand it, sadly, until I myself had cancer. In fact, when I first read it, as a healthy and obnoxious graduate school, I remember writing comments like “too sensitive” in the margins.

I have no patience for using cancer as a metaphor for all of the world’s ills—poverty, oppression, lack of freedom—because it turns people with cancer into vehicles and symbols of other problems. We don’t use other diseases, such as heart disease, similarly. We don’t call illiteracy or racism the “diabetes” or “Crohn’s Disease” of America. Cancer is somehow the exception, and it’s a cliché that needs to go away.

Relatedly, I would like people to stop discussing cancer as a “battle” and people with cancer as “fighters.” Wars have winners and losers. People who die of cancer aren’t losers. I don’t want someone to tell me to “keep being strong,” as though my confidence is going to determine when I die. Fighting language puts an unfair burden on the person with a disease. Moreover, cancer is comprised of my own cells, and I don’t want to fight myself. Using cancer as a metaphor is intellectually lazy.

The best way to speak about cancer is not to turn it into a metaphor. It is what it is—a disease, no more and no less. If I want to use cancer as a metaphor, I use metaphors such as labyrinths, journeys (I know, that’s so tired and clichéd as well, but at least it’s not offensive), as allegorical of exile, or as a source of knowledge. But the more I write, the less I use cancer metaphorically.

KHS: I recently attended a reading of yours, Anya, and during the question and answer session, I was blown away by how many of the audience members responded to your work by sharing their personal experiences of illness and suffering. It was a lot to receive, and I wonder how you deal with that, especially having just given so much already by sharing your work. In addition, I felt pangs of frustration, because there was no time for the other questions I wanted to ask and hear, about other aspects of your poetry. You write about God and being God-haunted. You write about myth and fairy tales. You write about history and family. Could you talk a bit about what draws you to these subjects, and what poems you’re working on, and what you’re reading that relates to that work, right now?

AKS: What healthy people don’t tend to see well is the emotional burden of having an illness. Sick people are expected to be vessels for healthy people’s grief; even at our worst times, we’re expected to listen to stories of horrible suffering and to comfort healthy people in their own sorrow or else to reassure healthy people that they’re okay. Amazingly, sick people continue to carry healthy people’s fears for them with incredible generosity and dignity. I would like healthy people to recognize the way in which they rely on the sick for their own sense of well-being. That said, if I can use my own cancer to help others, then I want to do so. If my poetry enables someone to speak of their grief, and if I can lighten someone’s sadness, it is an honor to do so. Helping others gives my life purpose and meaning. But I want able people to recognize that some sick people are not in the emotional position to help them, and to be sensitive about it.

And yes, I would love for people to ask me questions, like you have, about subjects other than cancer.

I have been driven lately to write about memory, time (especially time as a human construction), and history. I continue to be drawn strongly to myth and fairy tale as a way of ordering the human experiences of life, maturation, creation, confrontation with evil, and death. Only the Bible has influenced my work more than fairy tales have. Right now, I’m working on a cycle of pantoums based on the theme of time. Pantoums repeat lines in different stanzas, so they’re a natural form for the topic of time. I would like the same images to appear over and over again in the poems. The poems cover all sorts of subjects, from Victorian beach houses in New Jersey to changing the clocks for daylight saving’s time. I’m also continuing to write about faith and to argue with God and bargain with God about my life. I agree with theologians who believe that God has a lot to answer for, but I also believe that human beings have a lot to answer for. I’m trying to write some poems that are more overtly political than my ordinary work because I think the country is in a moment of crisis and that democracy is genuinely in danger.

I just read a marvelous German novel, All for Nothing, by Walter Kempowski, about the last days of World War II. The cyclical nature of time and memory is a major theme in that work. Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage is superb and, like Kempowski’s work, examines the trustworthiness of individual perception. And I’ve continued reading histories of the Second World War, which is an obsession of mine.

KHS: I’ll put Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing on to-be-read my list; I just finished reading Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage—listening to it, that is, a rich and wonderful auditory experience, indeed—and I absolutely loved the way that a novel shook up stereotypes about who is incarcerated, and why, and how relationships evolve and, at the same time, consistently sustain us, over time.

AKS: And what I loved, in addition, was that no character in An American Marriage was perfect, entirely heroic or entirely flawed. The characters were fully human, sometimes infuriating, and expected the reader to step into their worlds while we read, at the risk of making us uncomfortable. I like the not-knowingness that occurs in both fiction and poetry.

KHS: And now … the Guggenheim. You won it! What are you going to do with the time?

AKS: I’m going to write! I’m going to be selfish and write what I want to, when I want to. I’m going to take off teaching for a semester, lock myself in my office with a coffee, and write. I might travel, but my writing is so ritualistic and habit-driven that I get more done at home.

KHS: Finally: make up your own question, one that really presses on you, or you feel an urgency to respond to, on this day or night.

AKS: Am I using this precise moment in the best way that I can?

Buy From Nothing HERE & Second Bloom HERE & find out more @ AnyaSilverPoet

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Karen Halvorsen Schreck is the author of the historical novel Broken Ground (Simon & Schuster 2016), called a “masterfully written . . . must-read” by USA Today. Her previously published historical novel, Sing for Me, was described as “impressive…a well-wrought and edifying page-turner” (Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review). Karen’s Young Adult novel, While He Was Away (Sourcebooks), was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. She’s also the author of  Dream Journal (Hyperion), which was a 2006 Young Adult BookSense Pick, and the award-winning children’s book Lucy’s Family Tree (Tilbury House). Her short stories and articles have received various awards, including a Pushcart Prize, an Illinois State Arts Council Grant, and in 2008, first prize awards for memoir and devotional magazine writing from the Evangelical Press Association. Find out more @ KAREN HALVORSEN SCHRECK.

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