Interview With Tess Gallagher
by T.L. Kelly

Published in 'Left Bank', Spring 1993, Blue Heron Publishing  

Tess Gallagher describes herself as "kind of a ptarmigan of a poet" when she is writing. Ptarmigans live at the top of alpine mountains and are completely tame when one happens upon them because no one goes there. Gallagher's "alpine mountain" is a small house on a promontory just outside of Port Angeles, Washington, a house dominated by windows and light, with a sweeping view of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It is the house she and Raymond Carver built as a writing retreat and romantic hideaway. Though devastated by Carver's death from cancer in 1988, Gallagher returned to writing and recently had two new collections published, Moon Crossing Bridge and Portable Kisses. Moon Crossing Bridge is a journey through mourning and the new belongings and recognitions such loss of a life companion and love allows. Portable Kisses is the continuation of the light and resolve which was begun near the conclusion of Moon Crossing Bridge. Gallagher's temperament, humor and wit are present again. Though she is a ptarmigan about her physical and spiritual habitat, Gallagher's writing, spanning two decades, one collection of essays, one of short stories and a screenplay with Raymond Carver, is bold and spirited and often punctuated with a sting. "I aim for the spine, " she says of her intent. "I want you to feel a little chill when you finish a poem of mine. "

T.L. Kelly: Sky House...it's very comfortable here.

TESS Gallagher: Just right for one or two quiet people who get along well. I call it my hideout. I named it Sky House because the people across the way built a house that blocked the view of the town where I was born. [Port Angeles] Very tall, large house built on a small lot, took the view away from another couple on this road, too. I thought I should name the house to protect it from further encroachment.

TL: That reminds me of something you wrote about a woman who brings the issue of "encroachment" into poetry. You said in your essay on Marianne Moore ["Throwing the Scarecrows from the Garden: The Poetry of Marianne Moore" in A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry by Tess Gallagher, 1986, University of Michigan Press] that one reason you admire her work is her poems about animals on the verge of extinction. You pointed out the way she brought attention to the issue, to protect endangered forms from further encroachment, to preserve them.

Tess: Yes, even before it became popular to do that, Moore was doing it.

TL: Do poets today feel that poetry itself is an endangered species, and so there is more poetry being written about poetry, or about writing poetry, or about being a poet?

Tess: There has always been that element even since I started writing. When I went to writers' workshops I remember there being a lot of complaints that poems coming up in the workshop were self-referential. They would be a kind of human cry. Bur I think it's a natural thing for a poem to do, to talk of how it is happening, about its mechanism. Of course, if it is too self-reflective we won't be interested. It seems like now I'm asked more and more to speak to people who I thought weren't very interested in poetry, and I'm finding that they are writing poems and reading them. Last year, for instance, I was with doctors attending the Institute of Literature and Medicine at Hiram College near Cleveland. They used literature to explore different aspects of aging and illness, and stages of loss. I hadn't been aware of this institute before. Then I spoke at the Separation and Loss Institute at Virginia Mason Clinic in Seattle, and I was amazed. I was a keynote speaker and I'm a poet! Quite a wonderful invitation. There was another poet there, Ann Pitkin, and she happens to be a psychotherapist. I have a psychotherapist friend in Montreal who uses poetry in her work. I met a doctor at the Hiram College Institute who encourages the reading and writing of poetry in his practice.

TL: So you're saying poetry is definitely not dead, or even threatened.

Tess: No, I don't believe so. Not as I experience it.

TL: We've both read the article by Dana Gioia ["Can Poetry Matter?", The Atlantic Monthly, May 1991.] I got the impression from the article that this "poetry is dying" issue has been going on since at least 1934, when, as Gioia points out, Edmund Wilson published his essay, "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" The fact that the debate has been going on this long in itself tells us something of the staying power of poetry.

Tess: Yes. Gioia makes the claim that poetry's influence has "eroded." But then he says something I find is contradictory; that 20,000 poets are coming out of these writing programs in the next ten years.

TL: But I think Gioia means 20,000 poets out of a job.

Tess: But he doesn't say that. Gioia says that we haven't seen the effects of the influence of poetry in the communities. But my experience has been very different from his, because I live in a village, as such, not an urban area, and I have watched for forty years what is happening with poetry in this town. The community's attitude is very different now about poetry than when I grew up here. There are now poetry events at the community college and a Fine Arts Center, attended by people from all walks of life. If you go there for one of the noon readings, there are people there on their lunch breaks, from the community. Of course, this being a community college, the focus is different than at a university. It depends on students coming from the community, people who are working and take classes. I can't disqualify their interest in poetry simply because they're at a community college. Here, and in other communities, it is a center where people can gather. Also, Gioia didn't acknowledge all the work being done in the prisons. Poets have been teaching and reading in the prisons for the past twenty years. He didn't acknowledge that in small communities poets often work with the elderly, and poets are asked by local organizations to give programs, to give eulogies at funerals, to dedicate libraries, to speak at teachers' strikes -- all things I've done. I don't know that we have a huge amount of stature, but we are not unnoticed. I mean, nobody rushes up to me in the supermarket! But people are very much aware and proud that I live here.

TL: I have heard poetry in a hundred different places, but never have I gone to a university sponsored reading. I wondered where Gioia goes to hear poetry.

Tess: I'm not anti-university anymore, though I had been for many years. But Gioia seems to think universities support poetry better than they do, whereas I feel entirely expendable within that structure. Sure enough, when I left, the waters closed over with hardly a trace. I'm in touch with a lot of my former students, and they have a hard struggle. The time when universities were able to accommodate all of those who wanted to teach writing is certainly past. Young poets are going to have to be more versatile. They can't come up out of those writing programs assuming they will go get cushy university jobs. They're going to have to get out. You know, travel and see the world! I went to Ireland because I was curious about meeting those poets and getting in touch with a culture in which poetry was appreciated and acknowledged by "the folk." If you went into a pub and you said you were a poet, you wouldn't be laughed out of existence, you'd be asked to recite one of your poems. Poets do need to volunteer themselves in other places. Anytime that you work in a communiy you have the opportuniy to share your writing with others. To give poetry to the people around you.

TL: So what patt of this argument, that poetry is in danger of losing its influence, can we take seriously? Tess: It's true, in universities, that poets are the primary audience for readings. And it's true what Gioia says about poetry magazines. They haven't made an effort to find readers orher than poets and students. They will have to really exert themselves to create that kind of reception for their magazines.

TL: I agree with Gioia on at least one count; that leading critics rarely review poetry, and that "virtually no one reviews it except other poets."

Tess: Yes. Absolutely. I think there needs to be a lot more reviewing of poetry, and not only poetry, but of literary magazines. I think it would be interesting if poetry magazines were reviewed issue by issue somewhere. I would like to see individual issues reviewed. There's lots of room for a literary journal which would do just that. I think another legitimate complaint that Gioia said was about The New York Times Book Review. Poetry books are reviewed in groups, and you will have a poet who has been writing for twenty years reviewed with someone who has a first book, and there's no differentiation made whatsoever. One of my books was reviewed along with a couple of early books by other writers. Why do other poets agree to do this? I think poets ought to write en masse to The New York Times Book Review about the situation. If people started to complain regularly or found some organized way to do it, through the Writers' Union, the AWP or the American Poetry Society, then possibly it could be changed. I don't think that small press publishers have put enough pressure on The New York Times. They don't know how to motivate that arena yet.

TL What signs do you see that poetry will continue to invigorate our culture?

Tess: Poetry and art are being taught in our primary schools. That wasn't happening when I was growing up in these same schools. I never saw a poet until I was 17 years old and went to University of Washington and met Theodore Roethke. Now there are poets reading every week in my town; loggers, grocery clerks, secretaries, lawyers and retired people from all sorts of professions participate in these readings. As far as poetry's spiritual influence, I have people writing to me every week about Raymond Carver's work. I met a man by Ray's graveside, on the first anniversary of Ray's death. He was with two friends and we stood there and talked. He told me had found Ray's book, A New Path to the Waterfall, in the "inspirational" section of his local Boston bookstore! People have written to me and talked quite a lot about the impact of that book. One man who was facing death from cancer called me from Seattle. Someone had given him the book as a mainstay in his last days. We had this incredible hour-long conversation, and then, after his death, his wife also called me to say she'd found strength from the book. There are many instances of this in my own life that leads me to believe that poetry still has a powerful spiritual influence. Perhaps it isn't as pervasive or as evangelical as say, the Baptists. Maybe it doesn't provoke instant hypnosis like MTV, but it's there. It's present.

TL: You've just written two new collections and these are the first you've written since Ray's death. It seems you've found strength in poetry.

Tess: They seem more like provisional rafts I've thrown together out of the debris of my situations. When I've been most devastated by life I've fallen entirely silent, as I did the first six months after Ray's death. Poems could have nothing to do there in the abyss. Also I had charge of Ray's own last book of poems and those poems had to be brought to publication. In January of 1989 I did write "Red Poppy" -- the first poem of any consequences after his death. Other poems began to come, expressions of those actual days and feelings I lived through in this afterwards. I was strong enough finally to revisit the last times we had together, and the dying itself, the things I did to stay close to his spirit, since death leaves that for us. I wrote these poems in Sky House.....Like someone who names a house Sky House, I'm always looking for actual ways to extend my enclosures -- my houses, my poems, my lost loves -- by noticing the larger space which contains me -- sky. Hard not to be hopeful with that over you, right?