Patricia Fargnoli’s poem, “Roofmen” from her award-winning book Necessary Light has long been a favorite of mine. I once read it aloud to a therapist who had helped me through a difficult time. (I don’t often force people to listen to me read poetry.)
When I first decided to do the This Choice podcast series, she was the first poet to come to mind. Patricia Fargnoli is also one of the few American poets I have been able to sit down to lunch with – many years ago in Vermont. After chatting on Facebook, we quickly discovered that a Skype interview wouldn’t work (for reasons that will become clear in the interview). Patricia graciously offered to do a written interview instead, using my standard podcast questions.
So without further ado:
Patricia Fargnoli served as New Hampshire’s Poet Laureate from 2006-2009, and is the author of six collections of poetry. She has been the recipient of The Sheila Mooten Award, The ForeWord Magazine Silver Award for Poetry, the NH Literary Award for Outstanding Poetry, and Mary Oliver selected her book Necessary Light as the winner of The May Swenson Award. A retired clinical social-worker, “Pat” has been a Macdowell Fellow and is a past Associate Editor of The Worcester Review. She has been on the faculty of The Frost Place Poetry Festival and its teaching conference, and has taught at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, for Road Scholars, and in the Lifelong Learning Program (CALL) of Keene State College. She currently teaches privately, and is editing a book a new and selected poems.
When and where did you start writing poetry?
I wrote my first poem when I was six, as a Mother’s Day gift to my mother who had died the previous year. I brought it to my Aunt Nell (who took care of me) and asked her how to get it to my mother.
I don’t remember writing more poems until high school, but Aunt Nell, who was a retired kindergarten teacher, read books and poems to me every night. My favorite books were the children’s poetry books: Silver Pennies, More Silver Pennies, and Peter Patter’s Owl. I read those poems over and over and knew some of them by heart. I also loved One Hundred and One Famous Poems. And asked especially for Eugene Field’s “Little Boy Blue” and others to be read over and over. So the rhythms and images of poetry were in my head from a very early age.
I began to write poems in high school (very bad poems) which would be published in the school newspaper. And, as a young adult, I took several adult ed poetry courses ….where I learned little. I didn’t begin to seriously write poems though, until my late thirties when I enrolled in a graduate poetry class at Central CT. State College with the Fulbright and Guggenheim-winning poet, Brendan Galvin. I repeated that class over several year, coming to know six other wonderful women poets who became my lifelong workshop-mates and friends.
It was during my time in Brendan’s class that I published my first poems in Tendril and Poet Lore. And I was hooked. I wrote and submitted consistently then but it wasn’t until I was 62 that Mary Oliver chose my first book, Necessary Light, as the May Swenson book award winner.
There is the great myth of the tortured artist. I once read that Anne Sexton was upset because Sylvia Plath beat her to suicide. How do you deal with the “romance” our culture has with the poet-in-pain–in terms of your identity as a poet and as a mother, father, partner, friend, role model?
I was becoming a poet as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell were popular so I was very aware of the popular idea of the poet as a tortured artist. I do think that, in order to write good poetry, one must have a deep inner-life. And sometimes, not always, that depth comes through painful experiences that both leave scars and open the poet up emotionally. In my case, the early deaths of my mother and father (my father by suicide), and my upbringing by people not my parents, surely left my mind open for poetry. My brother, though, who had the same experiences never turned to poetry. Moreover I have poet-friends who never experienced the losses I did. So perhaps it is some combination of experiences and hard-wiring in the brain and heaven knows what else….pure lucky chance perhaps…that leads one to be a poet. However it happens, poetry has truly blessed my life.
Are you consciously trying to shape the story of your life? When did you begin that conscious journey, and how does poetry play a part?
In my early adult years, I had no concept of having the power to shape my life. I fell into a marriage at 19 with a much older man who had a severe drinking problem. He had custody of his two children a previous marriage, we quickly had three children and I was much too busy and overwhelmed to consider “shaping my life.” It wasn’t until I got in Al-Anon in my thirties that I began to understand that I had choices. I chose divorce and from then on chose my life, working as a social worker with troubled teens, taking poetry classes, and finally going back to school for a Master’s in Social Work. I worked as a therapist for ten years until, again fate took over and illness forced me to retire. I chose, then, and continue to choose, to focus on poetry.
As poets we are continually exploring our sensual experience of the world. How does your relationship with your body, with your body in the world (interacting socially, with nature, through pain/change) affect your writing?
In that way, my poetry is inseparable from the influences of my body. In these later years (I am now 78), I have been challenged by a number of chronic illnesses: diabetes, fibromyalgia, for instance among others, as well as winter-depressions. Some of my work responds to these directly, but most often my poems search for consolations in the face of the diminishment due to aging. In the past several years, I’ve struggled with a severe loss of hearing. Even with hearing aids, I live in a world of muffled sound and missed conversations. This too affects my personal life and the poems I write. In addition, I find that, with age, my access to language, especially verbs and nouns, has decreased. I think that I am not alone in this. A close friend, in her 80’s is no longer able to write poems, Donald Hall, also in his 80’s says that poems no longer come, another friend compensates by writing haiku. I still write poetry, often struggling to do so, and perhaps not as well. But then I think of poets like Stanley Kunitz who wrote stunning poems at a late age and am encouraged to keep writing.
And vice versa. In other words, does the practice of your writing, your poet’s attention to the word, affect how you physically feel and interact with other people, with nature, through pain/changes in your body.
Yes, absolutely. A friend one said: “poetry is the spiritual center of my world.” and that perfectly captures its importance to me. Poetry fills my days, it is the vehicle by which I deal with and express pain and sorrow and also joy. Even sad poems bring me joy, the process of writing, while frustrating, also brings me joy. The connections I’ve made with other poets across the country even across the world sustain me. I’ve been lucky enough to be a mentor to a number of others; I have a thick folder of loving fan mails. My poems and my connections to poets and to poetry have given meaning to my life. I believe that we are here to find out what we are supposed to be doing with our lives. For years, for me, that meant helping people through psychotherapy. When illness made that no longer possible, I turned full-time (through writing and through teaching) to poetry. It is my primary reason for being.
What is your favorite poem? Can you quote a bit of it for me?
I have many favorites and it is hard to choose just one. But my favorites always seem to give me some sustaining lesson or some moment of beauty.
Here’s part of “A Blessing” by James Wright about two Indian ponies:
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
Also [Rainer Maria] Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo:”, especially these lines:
And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,[…]
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
How has it (the poem, not the poet) influenced your writing, and your life in general?
“A Blessing” reminds me to look for and find joy in beauty wherever it is to be found. That to pay close attention to the world and the things in it is of utmost importance not only to writing poems, but to fully experiencing one’s life.
“The Archaic Torso of Apollo” especially the line “You must change your life” has been the guidepost for the life I have created in poetry. It is my constant reminder to keep poetry at the center of my life.
What poem of your own would you hope might influence someone else?
“Duties of the Spirit” from my book of the same name. It is about the loss, and grief and the importance of joy.
Thank you, Ren, for these interesting, thought-provoking questions and the opportunity to answer them.
I am grateful to Patricia for taking the time to answer the questions, and am looking forward to her new book! If you aren’t familiar with her work, do treat yourself: Necessary Light, Duties of the Spirit, Then, Something and Winter are all available through Amazon.
Also from the booksellers themselves: Duties of the Spirit, and Then, Something, Tupelo Press; Winter; Hobblebush Books.
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has looked the other way when it comes to the sexual abuse of children. She said that it had to be stopped “because it ruins lives”.