Interview with Susan Rich – Travel, Poetry, Food

Today’s interview is with Susan Rich, whose latest book, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, I reviewed for Rattle here.

Susan Rich is the author of three collections of poems including The Alchemist’s Kitchen which was short listed for the Forward Poetry Book of the Year Award, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue /Poems of the World which won the PEN West Award for Poetry. She is winner of the Times Literary Supplement Award, an Artists Trust Fellowship, and a Grant for Artist Project (GAP) award.

Web site – http://www.susanrich.net
Blog – http://thealchemistskitchen.blogspot.com/

Susan’s books –

The Alchemist’s Kitchen

Cures Include Travel

The Cartographer’s Tongue

Jeannine Hall Gailey: Susan, all of your books of poetry have a connection to your history of travel (for the Peace Corps, correct?) and I was wondering how travel inspires you and what you would recommend to other poets to help them turn their travels into poems?

Susan Rich: When I was in my twenties and thirties I lived and worked in several different countries: Bosnia, Republic of Niger, and South Africa — to name a few. Travel was my drug of choice. I worked in the field of international development and human rights for Oxfam America, the Peace Corps and later, for Amnesty International. In South Africa I was teaching at the University of Cape Town on a Fulbright Fellowship. In none of these positions was I actually focused on my own writing. Perhaps that’s important to mention: writing happens (for me) when I am busy doing other things. My desire was to help others, not to navel gaze (as my friends in international development would call any creative writing.)

As far as turning my travels into poems, I don’t. Again, my writing doesn’t work that way. I can write about actual people I meet that intrigue me or about an experience I had that is beyond my understanding. Tourist poems don’t interest me; poems of intense experience are what I care about and they are not held by landscape or continent. My only advice for other poets would be to live authentically. Don’t enter a new place thinking that you have the right to write about it. Enter with an open heart and an awareness of how much you don’t know.

JHG: If your poetry does not come directly out of your travels, how are the two connected?

SR: That’s both a tough question and a simple one. I don’t think that Elizabeth Bishop set out to write “Brazil” poems, but since she lived in Brazil for more than a decade, Brazil found its way into her poems. I think Lorca’s A Poet in New York was a way for him to make sense of what he was experiencing in a foreign country. More recently, Naomi Shihab Nye writes about Palestine, Columbia, and the local grocery store. One of the things I love about poetry is that it transcends national boundaries and moves us beyond our own history. Writing from our travels is just one more imaginative leap that poetry grants us.

JHG: What international writer have you discovered along the way that has impacted your own poetry?

SR: The poet that I went to South Africa to study is Ingrid deKok whose work is finally available in the United States. Seasonal Fires is a selection of her work and I highly recommend it. I was first introduced to Ingrid de Kok via her poems. At the time, I was an MFA student at the University Oregon searching for a subject which I could use to apply for a Fulbright Fellowship. Amazed by her poems, I tracked down via inter-library loan, a copy of Familiar Ground, published in South Africa. The book arrived stamped with the name of a community college in Michigan. It had yellow glue peeking from its spine, its pages felt tissue-paper thin. That hobo of a book changed my life and led me to Cape Town, South Africa.

It is a testament to Ingrid de Kok’s work that the poems spoke to me across countries and continents. Poems such as “Small Passing” and “To Drink Its Water”. I arrived in Cape Town at the same time that Snailpress released Transfer and I had the privilege of reviewing it for The Cape Times and later, for Poets & Writers.

Ingrid de Kok is a poet that as Marianne Moore said of Elizabeth Bishop, “she is spectacular in being unspectacular.” Indeed, Bishop is certainly one of de Kok’s influences. However, as with Bishop, the poems are hardly modest or polite. Her work deals with the struggles of Apartheid South Africa as well as the complexities of South Africa today. There are poems of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but there also poems of the natural beauty of the African veldt.

I should mention that Ingrid has since become a good friend. She has come out to Seattle to give readings and I anticipate her books with great pleasure.

JHG: What are you working on currently?

SR: Now that summer is here, I can finally spend concentrated time on my own poems. It’s always a difficult shift for me after the intensity of the academic year. At the moment, I have two projects going — somehow two different approaches allow me to feel less pressure on any one poem. I’ve just ordered a few books on the life of photographer Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) who lived and worked in Seattle and San Francisco. She was still photographing well into her nineties. I’m drawn to her work — why I can’t tell you except to say that it seems utterly compelling to me, beyond what is seen. A strange thing to say about a photograph perhaps, but there it is. The other project is to go back through my notes and drafts of poems from my time re-visiting Bosnia in 2008. I always do better with a fair bit of distance from my travels. Maybe I need to forget what I saw in order to invent what I know.

JHG: Besides writing moving poems about your travels, you have a wonderful knack for food poetry. Will you share a food-poetry-related exercise here?

SR: “There is no love more sincere than the love of food.” George Bernard Shaw

I first created this exercise when confronted with sixty people who had shown up for what I thought would be a small afternoon workshop at Lower Columbia College in Longview, Washington. I was floored by the over-stuffed classroom and needed a fun way for people to introduce themselves to the group. Since we would be looking at the interconnections between poetry and food, I had people introduce themselves with one sentence that began with their name and then mentioned a food they either loved or loathed. Going around the very large circle provided a diversity of foods and expressions. I was amazed at how passionately and confidently people seemed when they spoke of their own personal preferences. It was a simple step from those first lines to poems that expanded on the students’ original sentences.

My hope is that this allows students to develop confidence in their writing, coupled with a sense of play (go wild; make chocolate your reason to live; would you die rather than eat chopped liver again?) so that they can create energetic and entertaining pieces.

My Name is Stan and I Loathe Lobster: A Poem of Exaggeration

Ask students to introduce themselves by giving their name and a food that they love or loathe. Once everyone has done this and you’ve perhaps asked a few questions—“Jeannine, why do you love sauerkraut?” or “Barry, what is there to loathe about chocolate ice cream”? —everyone should proceed to the activity below.

Write a poem in which you take your like or dislike to the level of the absurd. One woman in my workshop started with “I’m Karen and I love wild salmon.” In her poem of exaggeration the wild salmon became a very sexy boyfriend waiting for her when she came home from work with a freshly prepared dinner. Of course, once the poem gets going the first line that we began with often becomes obsolete. Although you may also choose to keep a first line like this one, again from my workshop: “There should be a law against a cheese smarter than me.”
The more fun you have writing this, the better.