Grace Grown Out of Silence
A Conversation with Ann Fisher-Wirth
In an essay called “Toward an Urban Pastoral,” the late Reginald Shepherd identifies a problematic that faces contemporary English-language poetry. Our “readily available, thoroughly worked-out language” for writing about nature, Shepherd points out, developed when almost everyone lived in rural settings, but now almost everyone lives in urban settings. Consequently, “often what the language of nature produces is a simulacrum of nature, a reiteration of the vocabulary of nature that refers not to nature but to nature poetry.” Shepherd’s insight helps to explain why “ecopoetry” can’t just be a rebranding of “nature poetry,” why the accuracy of our understandings of nature and of ourselves depends on the freshness of our language. It also helps to explain my longstanding interest in the work of Ann Fisher-Wirth, who as a poet has been tireless in working out a language of nature, rather than reiterating the thoroughly worked-out language, and as an editor has recognized and convened others similarly engaged. It was an honor to ask after her poetry and her vision.
Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of seven poetry collections, and co-editor with Laura-Gray Street of The Ecopoetry Anthology. She has held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair of American Studies at Uppsala, Sweden, and is a senior fellow and board member of the Black Earth Institute. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi, and recently retired from the University of Mississippi, where she taught in the MFA program and directed the Environmental Studies program. I enjoyed this conversation with her about the life experiences that inform, and the processes that shaped, her most recent poetry collection, Paradise Is Jagged.
H. L. Hix: In your new collection the very first poem, “A Young Stag at Dusk,” stands on its own, preceding the groups of poems in numbered sections that follow. I experience it as a welcome, even a blessing or invocation. It recalls to mind Frank Bidart’s observation that “The gestures poems make are the same as the gestures of ritual injunction — curse; exorcism; prayer; underlying everything perhaps, the attempt to make someone or something live again.” Is this at all related to how you experience/mean that poem?
Ann Fisher-Wirth: Thank you for this beautiful question.
I wrote much of Paradise Is Jagged during the pandemic, when my life was largely confined to our house and yard and the immediate neighborhood. We live in an old house in Oxford, Mississippi, on an acre of land that is covered with trees—especially two huge pecan trees in the front yard, a big crape myrtle hedge that separates us from the street, and a sort of thicket of various things including privet and bamboo that separates us from the historical LQC Lamar House to the north. I spent many hours in the rocking chair on our front porch; I made myself an unofficial office, with my feet up on another chair, books on a little side table, laptop on my knees, listening to the birds, being in the presence of those magnificent trees.
We live three blocks from St. Paul’s Cemetery, the beautiful, hilly, old graveyard where Faulkner is buried. One evening, as I walked through the graveyard, I saw a deer just standing there, quietly observing me, until he turned and vanished into the trees. That began the poem, which I wrote later in that rocking chair.
It was springtime, and the Peace roses that grow on one wall of our house were blooming. There was little traffic; the air cleared, and in the abatement of human noise, all the different birds that live here chirped and trilled. It was a time of fear, of course, but also great silence, and out of that silence grew a sense of grace. So yes, by the end this poem becomes a blessing.
HH: That helps me keep thinking toward what I feel in reading that poem. The poem becomes a blessing by registering a set of transformations: its own transformation from perception to performative (its becoming a blessing), the transformation of silence into grace, the transformation of the deer’s quiet observation into the poem’s, and so on. The repetition of “May” in those last four lines reminds me, for instance, of Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats,” and of the repetition of “Let” in Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come.”
Keeping that company seems important to me, part of the poem’s wisdom and gift. Not everyone across the planet responded to the pandemic by wishing others peace! Am I putting too much pressure on those last few lines, to notice that the “Mays” bless animal, plant, and human? To take that blessing of animal, plant, and human as establishing the tenor of the whole book?
AF-W: Absolutely. I felt a deep sense of acceptance and affirmation. It’s like the Biblical “so be it.” Let what is, be. And your question points out to me, in turn, that this section of the poem is about coming into being and going out of being—so much on everyone’s minds during the pandemic. The bread is rising, the birds are “speaking,” the deer is vanishing, the roses are dying.
HH: As soon as we observe those themes (motifs? concerns?) in the opening poem, of course I see them informing the whole book. Caroline Casper in the next poem, for example, is up “to the elbows in work” and “could not leave,” but that doesn’t keep her from letting what is, be. She can’t travel (she’s the keystone), but she lives the paradox of achieving a state of mind in which to receive what is given her? You’ll have a smarter way of talking about this…
AF-W: It’s interesting that you see serenity or a sense of acceptance in “Caroline Casper.” There are so many ways I want to approach your question—here’s a start.
Caroline Casper is an invention, though those names do figure in my family history (and my middle name is Carolyn). Both my parents were from Nebraska—Omaha, specifically—and though their own families were not farmers, my mother had many relatives who were. My father was born in 1904, my mother, in 1911. There is so much I do not know about them or my ancestors and there is no longer anyone who can tell me—but I do viscerally know my parents’ temperaments. When I was little, I just assumed every family was like mine: all parents were as hard-working as mine, as respectable as mine, with their gentler version of Calvinist rectitude, and as little given to display or eccentricity. My father, a career Army officer, was overseas for extended periods and died when I was 15, so I didn’t know him very well. My mother, for all her propriety, had a deep, private sense of mystery; she was a Christian Scientist, a healer—and she was an artist, one of whose paintings, which hangs on our bedroom wall, provided the cover of Paradise Is Jagged. So “Caroline Casper,” like several of the other poems in the book, evokes something of my sense of her. To me, Caroline Casper is also secret kin to the grandmother in Marilynne Robinson’s amazing novel Housekeeping, who has a similar experience of defamiliarization and awe one day while gathering potatoes: “What have I seen, what have I seen,” Robinson writes. “The earth and the sky and the garden, not as they always are.”
Your phrase “achieving a state of mind in which to receive what is given her” describes so much about the struggles in this book. The poem “Sunday, a Zuihitsu,” early on, ends with this exchange between my mother and me, aged four or five:
I woke her up one night. I’m afraid of something that starts with D.
Daddy?
No.
Dogs?
No.
She was quiet a moment, thinking. She put her arms around me.
Death?
The book’s final poem, “Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay,” describes watching the filmed funeral celebrations for the Zen Buddhist peace activist and wisdom figure whose monastery Magnolia Grove figures importantly throughout my book. It ends like this:
I sat breathing,
watching, as in a vast procession
chosen ones dressed in gold and scarlet
carried his casket heaped with chrysanthemums
to the fire, and I thought, How could I ever
be afraid of death?
This morning I woke
still wrapped in his blessing, merciful as the rain.
So yes, Paradise Is Jagged, much of which I wrote during Covid and during and after my sister’s death, really does struggle to accept what has been given me—and what has been given to all of us.
HH: Everything in what you’ve just said would be worth our pursuing! Housekeeping is maybe my favorite novel ever, one I’ve read and listened to and taught many, many times. The zuihitsu as a form seems important to this book: it occurs at least one more time (in the poem “Costa Rica”) in addition to the one you cite here. Places, too, seem important: Magnolia Grove, the California mountains, Mississippi, and so on.
But let me latch onto the struggle to accept what is given. As soon as you say that Paradise Is Jagged “really does struggle to accept what has been given me—and what has been given to all of us,” I see something about the book that I think I sensed before but couldn’t have pointed to until now, and that I’d want to identify as important to the book’s elegance and profundity: its recognition of the inseparability (the identity?) of what has been given and what has been taken away. Persons one loves (here, especially, your sister), experiences in one’s life, one’s life itself: all taken away as they are given, given by being taken away, given in the taking away…
I guess I haven’t quite managed a question here, but I hope this is something you’ll speak to.
AF-W: “Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never fall?” That’s Wallace Stevens, in “Sunday Morning,” the great poem that arrives at the awareness that “Death is the mother of beauty.” But to speak specifically about my sister— She was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer in May 2019, struggled with a series of brutal treatments and disappointments, and died on October 1 of that year. During those months, any withholding there had ever been between us fell away; we were able to speak more nakedly to each other than ever, and show more love to each other than ever. Since we didn’t live close to each other, the hours we could spend together were few—but they were luminous.
A central tenet of Buddhism is that all things are in a constant state of transformation and change. That is one of the hardest things of all to accept. But as Thich Nhat Hanh said in The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology, in a passage my students loved,
A view that is not based on impermanence is a wrong view. When we have the insight of impermanence, we suffer less and we create more happiness.
… When you are angry with your friend, and you are about to have an argument, the Buddha would say to you, “Close your eyes. Imagine yourself and your friend in three centuries. Where will the two of you be? . . . The only thing that makes sense at that moment is to open your arms and hug that person.
So yes, given in the taking away.
HH: In initiating this brief conversation with you, my hope has been that it will invite readers into Paradise Is Jagged by taking a “peek” into it through a poem or two, but I don’t want to let this opportunity pass without asking you to wrap this up by coming at things from the other direction: contextualizing the book, especially in relation to your previous work. Your collaboration with Laura-Gray Street, The Ecopoetry Anthology, has rightfully won a grateful readership for making such an important contribution to such an important direction in contemporary poetry, and your several previous poetry collections, each elegant on its own, now comprise a whole-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts.
A faithful Fisher-Wirth reader of course will feel continuities with that prior work. (For example, the way we opened this conversation brought to mind for me your “Mississippi Invocation,” from The Bones of Winter Birds, replete with such beckonings as “Jasmine, wisteria, twine us, ensnare us, / stupefy us with your sugary blossoms.”) Would you please claim the last word here, though, by speaking to ways in which Paradise Is Jagged proved, in the writing of it or as a finished product, discontinuous with your previous work? Are there points at which it surprised you? Particular poems that “took you places you hadn’t been before”? Ways in which this collection represents a shift or turn for you?
AF-W: This is such an intriguing—and challenging—question. Thank you for mentioning my other books, and for asking me to look back over the trajectory of my writing.
My dissertation, which became my first (and only academic) book, is titled William Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature, and in it I argue that everything Williams wrote was one or another form of autobiography. I’d say the same for my own work, too; as I think back over the various books I’ve written, I can see how each reflects and takes its form from whatever was going on in my life. For instance, years ago I played the lead in a one-act by Tennessee Williams called The Mutilated, in which I—in real life, a middle-aged professor and mother of five—was an alcoholic, one-breasted Southern belle named Trinket who tries to seduce the student who played a 19-year-old sailor, and I found the experience so exhilarating yet disturbing that every night I would rush home and write another poem in what became my chapbook The Trinket Poems. In 2002-2003, I spent a year in Sweden with my husband on a Fulbright, went through a series of intense personal experiences as well as many adventures and discoveries about this new place, and wrote Carta Marina. Later, over a couple of years, my friend the photographer Maude Schuyler Clay sent me photographs of the Mississippi Delta, and that led to our collaboration in the book Mississippi. As Jorge Luis Borges eloquently remarked:
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
Paradise Is Jagged continues in this autobiographical vein. Even so, what’s new, and discontinuous? For the challenge, as Pound and Williams often commented, is to make it new.
As far as formal considerations, three poetic forms became important to me as I worked on Paradise Is Jagged: the zuihitsu, the golden shovel, and the abcedarian. As you know, “zuihitsu” literally means “running brush”; it is originally a Japanese form that dates from around 1000 CE and loosely connects personal bits and fragments responding to the author’s surroundings. I love zuihitsus because of their freedom. Like prose poems, they get away from lineation yet retain other resources of poetic language. More than prose poems, they allow me to improvise, to create structures based on bricolage, to draw together disparate materials, as in my poem “Costa Rica,” the second half of which is a list of fragmentary memories, natural history wonders, that I learned about while teaching a study abroad trip to Monteverde.
The golden shovel in Paradise Is Jagged is “at the mississippi civil rights museum,” which is an homage to Lucille Clifton and her great poem “miss rosie.” As my poem tells, I met Clifton in the 1980’s; she is a poet whose work I love and a person whom I revere. I first read “miss rosie” long before that, and long before I lived in the South, and its commingled strength and tenderness (‘i stand up through your destruction”) awed me. I intensely followed the Civil Rights movement during my adolescence in Berkeley in the 1960’s, and I’ve written a lot about Mississippi since moving here in 1988—but visiting the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum shortly after it opened in Jackson brought a whole new level of grief and revelation.
And I started working with the abcedarian on a lark, but there came to be three of them, and they are important in structuring the latter half of the book. The first, a straightforward abcedarian called “Transformations,” unfolded from the phrase “And insects in the midnight trees” and sort of became a series of trippy memories, ending with the “Heraclitean fire” into which all things vanish. The second, “Visitation,” is a broken abcedarian; it starts with N, goes through Z, and begins again with A, ending with M. It is broken because it is about a broken family and my all-too-seldom visits with two of my grandchildren. And the third, “Jagged Paradise,” is a love poem. As time moves forward, from A or birth to Z or death, and as my husband and I grow older, this poem insists on the eternal return of love and art, which have the power to defy time and take us simultaneously forward, yet back to the beginning. It begins,
Zing!
You’re alive, aren’t you?
X-rays show nothing wrong,
why fight against this happiness?
and moves backward, to end with A: “All the leaves are mottled and stained. Amen. Breathe in, it’s late October.”
In other ways, too, Paradise Is Jagged is discontinuous with my earlier work, because of events in my, and our, world. There is a lot of pain in this book. Some of the poems try to chart a path through suffering. One long poem in sections, “The Astonishing Light,” is about my experience in 2019 team-teaching in the Prison to College Pipeline program created by Patrick Alexander and Otis Pickett, at Parchman, the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary—an experience that opened my eyes to many things about racial and economic injustice both in Mississippi and throughout the US carceral system. Many of the poems, of which “A Young Stag at Dusk” is an example, were written during the pandemic. Others were written during and after the five devastating months in which my sister Jennifer died of cancer.
But I’d like to end by mentioning once again the presence of Magnolia Grove, Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastery near here which I have visited several times during the past few years, and also mentioning my decades-long practice of yoga, which I taught until recently at Southern Star in Oxford. Returning again and again to the breath—prana, spirit, that which flows through everything that has existence—took me through. One of the poems that is most important to me in this book is an elegy for my sister called “Thum.” It ends this way:
The dance of all this dying,
all this grieving,
all this pain, seems to me
like prana moving through us,
like those swaying branches
in midsummer,
Mississippi, where at night
the vast trees throb with cicadas’ silver music.
Thank you so much, Harvey, for interviewing me.
H. L. Hix
H. L. Hix’s recent books include a novel, The Death of H. L. Hix; a poetry collection, Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark; an edition, with Julie Kane, of selected poems by contemporary Lithuanian poet Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė, called Terribly In Love; an essay collection, Demonstrategy; and an anthology of “poets and poetries, talking back,” Counterclaims. He professes philosophy and creative writing at a university in “one of those square states.”
