L.A. Seidensticker

Artist statement: "Imagining a Smaller House" - The houses I recurrently dream of are as apparent to me as those I have lived in, and in some cases more so. Houses that are permeated with the lives they have sheltered, a fissured bar of white soap on the back of a sink a message of grief unspoken over years. I think of the house that was sold as a paradigm of places and people that I have failed to leave decisively. When doors are not closed tightly what is left behind can follow forever in your wake. Not long before losing this particular house I had what would once have been called a nervous breakdown, in the midst of which I became unable to leave the house at all, unable, as it were, to close a door behind me. The doors that haunt me now are those meant to open OUT…that will not.

"The Voice of Running Water" - The first wordless thing is the morning, the day unwritten upon. Still-wordless things remain in a state of abeyance, near motionless. The first music (wordless) is from the river, which is in ceaseless movement and conveyance. And the persistent idea of music without words. For whom are words more integral than for a therapist? A therapist who will not speak and/or silences his patients is winter-out-of season, death standing in snow under leafless trees. Words will out though. They bring themselves forth into being from out of their own silence to manifest as lyric or lullaby or speech, preventing us from collapsing into our own emptiness. Melody may be forgotten or exhausted, but words that have wrestled themselves into the world will sustain. “Always” may not be too grand a claim.

Bio: I live at the top of a canyon at the end of two miles of steep, narrow dirt road; the closest house is a few miles distant. Beginning in the second or third grade I have been writing, generally during explanations of the cursive alphabet, algebraic equations or Spanish verbs. My intellectual achievements remain undistinguished. What I have learned is that publication is pretty much a myth. I wrote bad poems and bad short stories. I worked secretively on a few bad novels. In my early thirties one of these novels was accepted provisionally by a well thought of publisher. It was felt, however, that this work would best be presented as a second release, preceded by something “a little less dark.” Accordingly I wrote and submitted a few chapters featuring a woman who pushes her husband off the edge of a very high cliff. Though severely damaged, he survives, mute, befuddled, and slumped sideways in a wheelchair, a kitchen towel tied ‘round his neck to soak up the endless dribble. Unhappily, my avid supporter and almost-publisher was herself wheelchair bound. I have a longer than average life list of this sort of grotesque error; in due time no doubt many additional gaffes will ripen and fall.

Without managing to achieve a degree I have attended colleges in Oakland, Arizona, Mexico City, and Sonoma. I was especially pleased to be accepted at New College in San Francisco…Which within the following week lost its accreditation and closed, taking my transcripts with it.

I rejoice to live in something of a wilderness, here and in a cabin in Montana, up against the Canadian border. Intending never to marry, I have been married three times. I expect this is the way it goes. Not getting all you want. Getting more, falling most in love with the unexpected.

It seems there is already enough to digest in your statement about “Imagining a Smaller House,” so I won’t trouble you for the whys of this poem. Instead, I’d like to begin with the postpartum. Has writing this poem in any way changed your relationship with the house or the paradigm you believe it represents?

The house is no longer mine, so that is certainly a kind of change. I have a sense of it also not being otherwise available to me, although it could well be that whoever lives there would be pleased to let me take a tour. The point is that I would not. I imagine revisiting the place (in reality) would be uncomfortable and upsetting. I remain disinclined to make clean breaks. My relationship to the past unfortunately includes a psychological clinging; but also there is a more overt one: the re-visiting in dreams and a compulsive remembering.

You have a great couple of lines near the middle of this: “and is lost merely for its having been / too-far-rearward …” This statement seems to be a skeleton key to much more than this poem. Is poetry an essential means of retrieval for you? What is it about poetry that allows you to access things that would be otherwise unreachable?

These questions are especially close to the bone. I have a perhaps exaggerated regard for privacy, troublesome in part because an obvious extension of this sort of dogged privacy is vanity. And vanity was the most shameful thing of all when I was growing up. Consequently I was generally crouching in the far background…and yearning to be noticed. Poetry has provided me virtually infinite opportunities to come to the fore without necessarily seeming to put myself on stage. Those images and ideas that infuse poetry are often recoveries (unconscious) from the forbidden thoughts and desires of childhood, and there is enormous pleasure and satisfaction in bringing them into the light at no apparent cost to oneself. Poetry encourages me to assert myself as I would never dare to without the attendant obfuscation.

In your statement about “The Voice of Running Water,” you put forward the notion of words having a sense of permanence. Is this part of what attracts you to poetry?

That as a society we have a powerful attachment to IM-permanency has been well discussed. Many of us suffer a chronic, primarily impotent grief for what is lost to this acceptance of disposability. The permanency of words is thrilling as well as daunting. What is said cannot be unsaid; there is a lot of power in that. A jilted lover’s objection that “you said you would love me forever,” is indication of how treasured (if sometimes foolish) our assumptions are of the power of words. So much, including our lives, does not sustain. Words provide us a taste of Olympus. So let it be written, so let it be done.

What do you believe to be the pros and cons of this permanence in regards to creative writing? What happens when words outlive their context?

I will belabor the point by stressing that the great ones don’t. Shakespeare’s being the most immediate example. Although I could as happily argue that in fact Shakespeare’s words have brilliantly outlived their context. In any case, few of us are likely to produce deathless prose. As an aside, I think poets more likely to achieve permanence in their work than fiction writers. Poets are far likelier than creative writers to attend to their output, painfully, word by word. In fiction the story often takes precedence…and is likely dead on the page after five or ten years.

In your bio, you mention that you once wrote short stories and novels. Do you still write fiction?

I write less and less fiction. The naturally longish-winded expository nature of fiction can tend to make it less engaging than poetry, though perhaps more exciting. Poetry sometimes suffers from complexity, but untangling a complication has its rewards; fiction for me, especially reading it, is most often a guilty indulgence: my goal being to check out. Of course I am not talking about Borges here. Also I am not particularly good at writing fiction. The very demanding and generally ponderous forward motion of it wears me out.

Living a few miles from the nearest house, it sounds as though you have the option of creating in relative seclusion. How has this solitude both benefited and hindered your work?

Many, perhaps most of my poems begin in the bathtub. A superior seclusion that I feel entirely justified in maintaining by locking the door. An agreeable line will occur to me and I am utterly happy working it ‘round and ‘round, adding to it, copying it blotchily onto the end pages of whatever I am otherwise in the midst of reading. In fact At Home opportunities for solitude are not that numerous. I am at work with few exceptions 6 days a week, when I am home, between the phone, the dogs, and my family I feel highly put upon and generally disrespected. As for hindrances, my inclination is always in the direction of solitude. Over the years I have become (as much as possible) a hermit. I have allowed friendships to dissolve, neglected to respond to dinner invitations or to proffer same. At work I am entirely at the mercy of a nearly constantly ringing phone. At home I refuse to answer it at all. While all this is comfortable for me, I realize I lead a narrower and narrower life.

You also state that “publication is pretty much a myth.” Could you elaborate on this a bit more?

There is little new I can say about the unlikelihood of publication. There are hundreds of money-making “contests”, numberless offers to build-your-own-chapbook (a particularly horrible thought), there are scores of colleges and universities offering classes that, it is hinted, might lead to fame and fortune. On the opposite side of the ledger are the happy boasts of the published, often excellent writers, nearly all of whom have been funded, mentored, groomed and well presented. Additionally, the web. A lot of fun and good practice, but amateurs critiqueing amateurs…shocking to find out that real poets are stylistically worlds apart. The embittered will be pleased to speak of exceptions. I am confident I will not be one of them.

The Internet is dramatically changing the way poetry reaches readers. Every day, new blogs, personal websites, and e-magazines are launched into the fracas of cyberspace activity, all of them vying for the online world’s attention. What does ‘publication’ mean these days, given our media-saturated era?

Gone are the days “publication” dependably suggested revelation to a horde, or even hordes. Vis a vis current poetry and short stories, the internet more generally exists for the pleasure of its participants, which pleasure consists primarily in seeing their/our work in print. I don’t see anything especially disturbing in this, but such publication does become increasingly inbred and devalued. I wonder sometimes if a dependency on website publication isn’t apt to produce a finally very disappointing inflation, an imagined status that is lost at no little pain.

Who are some of the poets creating today whom you admire? How were you introduced to their work?

Most of the poetry I read is not au courant. Louise Glück is wonderful, Jorie gives me the vapors; I read as much of Follain as I can find (which is not much) and also of Transtromer, who is just endlessly subtle and stunning. I hugely admire Simic. As for introductions, I know that in the beginning it was a matter of reading randomly through the poetry shelf at Borders. More recently I find interesting poets through NY book review, TLS, etc. And then the cross referencing of poets through memoir and reviews.

You’ve attended quite a few colleges. Have you studied creative writing at any of them? If so, what have been some of the more valuable lessons and/or exercises you’ve received from this formal education?

I’ve taken quite a few creative writing classes, beginning in summer school, early junior high, where I picked up not much in the way of art, but had the time and opportunity to develop my arguably most useful asset: typing. I understand typing classes are long out of favor, which seems a great shame. For the last few years I’ve been keeping a look-out for one of those bulky, usually dark green, viciously weighty typewriters that sat, one per desk, on every desk in the typing room. The ones with the silvery return carriage. To my surprise, they seem to have all vanished, another great shame. I had the opportunity to write and direct a play at Sonoma State several years ago. It was cancelled immediately following the dress rehearsal, during which the leading man inexplicably read all of his lines from a stack of loose papers. It was a disappointing end, but the thrill of the many rehearsals, words I had written recited and discussed…I don’t think much has equaled or exceeded that. I was for a few semesters a teaching assistant to Gerald Rosen (creative writing) who is now retired. Very enjoyable but somehow not especially instructive. The fault of my inattention maybe. My sense of what constitutes good writing has been developed not so much by formal instruction as by reading, selectively and not so selectively.

Are there elements of creative writing you believe writers can only acquire outside of institutions?

Of course there are. Hearkening back to my thoughts on publication-by-internet, institutions are tepid-beds of circle jerk insularity. Not by design but by usage. There’s a tendency for the instructor to dictate, however subtly, a preferred path to praise, which for beginning writers is as good as it gets. Catastrophes are rare in the confines of creative writing workshops/classes. Boats don’t sink, cars don’t swerve between the desks, ivory towers do not crumble. The world beyond academia is where reality takes place. Where the mean streets are and the couture as well. It’s where we grow up and make mistakes our mothers aren’t there to rectify. It’s where, in short, we are unceremoniously plunged into somethings to write about.

Do you have any advice for those relatively new to writing poetry? How about for those relatively new to reading it?

An urge to give advice is difficult to resist. I will not try. The advice though is basic. Those of us who take up poetry by longing, inchoate or not, rather than by assignment, will very likely and early develop a passion. It will urge us awake at three in the morning, suggest we take pen in hand and write that sentence that is yapping and scratching at the bleared edge of our only marginally wakened consciousness. Give in to it. Give into it always. To be inspired in this manner, to have inspiration rise in you without your hand at its collar, this is a gift. And if you do not honor it, it will fade back into its origins and it will lose your address. In advising new readers, I would suggest being wildly catholic. Since infinite variety exists, why not wallow in it. You have life ahead of you in which to play favorites, feign humility and become narrow and dull.