By Sage Cohen
Mari L’Esperance is one of my very favorite poets and people. For nearly 20 years, I have had th
e pleasure of witnessing the evolution of her poetic voice and wisdom.
L’Esperance’s stunning debut poetry collection, The Darkened Temple explores the haunting disappearance of a mother and the resonance of loss throughout history, folklore and the natural world. With the balm of lyric, visceral imagery, L'Esperance makes palpable the hollowed and hallowed places she excavates.
This book is so imbued with spirit that I can almost hear the echoes and taste the dust of the darkened temple as I read. I paradoxically find myself uplifted by the authority of L'Esperance's gorgeous language, the graciousness of her gaze--even as I mourn alongside the speaker the crossing that mother and daughter are not able to make.
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The Bush Warbler Laments to the Woodcutter
By Mari L’Esperance
I offered you sanctuary with one condition.
Even this much you could not hold.
When you looked into the forbidden chamber
my three daughters became birds
and flew away from me forever.
Memory of our transgressions is a stone. It lies
on the seabed of our deepest forgetting.
—regret and sorrow in the making
Before you came I swept this house daily
with a long broom of rice straw.
Often I would wander from room to room
touching each treasure as I passed:
a golden screen, three red lacquer bowls—
Now, all is dust suspended in late sunlight.
This forest house, with its paper doors and secrets,
is too large for me now. Let it dissolve in mist
and absence, no trace left for the lost children.
What am I but the flower of your deepest self?
—crushed chrysanthemum petals underfoot
Instead, I am cast out across vast distances,
circling far above the trees, never to be human.
You will say that a grand house once stood
in a forest clearing. Then: nothing but birdcalls.
Longing itself is nothing but the heart’s open spaces.
—regret and sorrow, come calling
If I could make it so, I would be the one left alone
in the meadow, rubbing my eyes and wondering.
Remember this: I, once a woman, took you in,
an exchange for a promise kept.
Three maidens startled, then transformed into birds.
Whatever you abandon returns in your dreams.
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Reprinted from THE DARKENED TEMPLE by Mari L'Esperance by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. © 2008 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Available wherever books are sold or from the University of Nebraska Press 800.755.1105 and on the web at nebraskapress.unl.edu. Please do not duplicate elsewhere without permission.
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What brought you to poetry, and what has sustained your relationship with poetry over the years?
I suppose that life itself brought me to poetry. As for early influences, as a child I loved Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, a gift from my parents; this was my first exposure to “real” poetry – its sounds and rhythms, most of all. The same could be said for Dr. Seuss’ books.
My parents were not poets or readers of poetry, but they were avid readers and introduced me early to books, mostly fiction and classic children’s literature (The Wind in the Willows, which is more a dream than a narrative, is still my favorite book of all time). And there was always music in the house (my father is a choral director in Tokyo) of some kind or another and I studied the piano for about 10 years; these most certainly influenced my eventual attraction to poetry.
I must also credit my Japanese-born mother’s influence; she introduced me early on to Japanese language and traditional culture with its inherent appreciation of nature, its fluid and integrated relationship between inner and outer, and of that which transpires in the spaces between -- all of which I feel come through in my poems. However, I did not read poetry with any kind of focus until high school (and then mostly because it was required), and then not again until my late 20s, when I began to write my own poems in various workshops in the Bay Area.
The constancy of poetry has carried and sustained me through significant phases of my life, some of them quite difficult. After graduate school there were years when I did not write a thing. But poetry has always been there, like a subterranean river, keeping me going and grounding me in what matters. It’s a resource I draw from, like a well, whenever the need calls. It’s my one unconditional relationship!
You have a graduate degree in creative writing from New York University. How do you feel this education influenced your development as a poet?
Graduate school was like a dream, albeit one not without its challenges, personal and otherwise. But it was largely a positive, transformative experience: living in New York City for the first time, writing and reading poems alongside others, attending readings, visiting museums and galleries, walking the city, taking it all in…
It was a pivotal time for me, one that deepened and refined my relationship to poetry and validated me as a poet. I benefited much from interactions with and feedback from my teachers and peers and made a few lasting friendships. That said, since graduating in 1996 I have had to be in the dark for some years, in part to focus on other matters, but also to feel my halting way to my own voice, to poems that are my own and not of the workshop.
I’ve heard it said that one must forget everything that one learned in graduate school. To some degree this is true. Every student, every individual, must make her own way in the wilderness to arrive at some measure of authenticity. It’s a rite of passage. But we also don’t write alone; we carry along with us, and fold into our developing poems and person, everyone and everything that’s touched us in some way.
How did your book The Darkened Temple take shape? And how did you decide which poems belonged together here?
Shortly before graduating from NYU, Sharon Olds, who was my thesis advisor, said to me, “You’re going to have a book!” I didn’t entirely believe her then, but it planted a seed, one that I carried and nurtured in subsequent years when poems often felt a million miles away.
The Darkened Temple was written over a span of about 12-13 years. About a third of the poems were written in graduate school and many of these were included in my chapbook Begin Here (2000 Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press). In the years between NYU and the book’s acceptance, I was writing fitfully, with productive periods here and there. Life interrupted, as it frequently does, and I made choices (immersing myself in another field, for example), but the idea of a book of poems was always with me.
Sometime late in 2006 I found myself with some open time and it occurred to me that I might have enough poems for a full-length manuscript, which I then began to put together. It wasn’t too difficult to intuitively determine which poems to include and how they should be arranged. After the manuscript was accepted for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in June 2007, series editor Hilda Raz gave me many helpful suggestions for edits and revisions, several of which I incorporated. I also wrote four new poems for the manuscript.
When I give readings I generally describe the arc of the book like so: the first of the book’s three sections is a “circling” or “gathering,” encompassing poems written from various perspectives of cultural and personal history; the poems in the second section bear down and intently focus on the book’s central event and its aftermath; while the poems in the third section embody a sense of emergence, acceptance, and release.
You won the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. That's really impressive! How has your life and/or your relationship with poetry changed since this success?
Thanks, Sage… My life hasn’t changed all that much, nor has my relationship with poetry, other than that I now take myself a little more seriously as a poet, as in, “Maybe I can do this poetry thing after all!” People seem to take notice a bit more when they learn that my book won the prize. That, admittedly, feels good; I’m trying to learn how to enjoy my accomplishments!
I’ve given some readings, which have been gratifying, and have met people -- poets and readers of poetry, mostly -- and I’ve been generously invited to visit classes and answer interview questions such as yours. But in the end, I’m still a person with the same growing edges, the same bad habits, the same bag of shadow (to paraphrase Robert Bly’s apt metaphor) dragging behind me (although it does seem to get lighter with each passing year). A person who has to face the blank page (or screen, depending on your preference) -- and herself -- and begin anew each time, just like every other poet. I don’t think my head has gotten any bigger as a result of the prize, at least I hope not.
I must say that having work and relationships outside the poetry world helps me to maintain perspective and a sense of balance. For me, being a poet is a way of life, not a “career”. It’s an art and a practice, yes, but equally important, it’s a way of seeing and being in the world. After all, it’s the poems that matter, in the end. The rest is… the rest. It’s easy to lose sight of this in the rarefied and largely hermetic “po-biz” universe with all of its seductive bells and whistles. Take it all away, and what’s left?
Poetry.
What poetry books are next to your bedside table? What are you appreciating about them?
At the moment the pile next to my bed is growing dangerously high and will require an emergency pruning soon to avert disaster. I recently went through a spate of poetry book buying and kind of pigged out at the trough. Not hard to do, especially during National Poetry Month! Let’s see, I’ve got D.A. Powell’s Chronic, Jane Mead’s The Usable Field, Li-Young Lee’s Behind My Eyes, Kazim Ali’s The Far Mosque, Russell Edson’s See Jack, Mary Ruefle’s Cold Pluto, Paula Bohince’s beautiful book Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, Larissa Szporluk’s Dark Sky Question, Phillis Levin’s May Day, and Rusty Morrison’s the true keeps calm biding its story…I’ll spare you and skip the piles on the floor.
I appreciate different things about each of these books, but do like that each deals with darkness and shadow in some way, but artfully rather than narcissistically. I’m also a sucker for beauty and these are beautiful books. Sadly, beauty seems to get a bad rap these days, particularly in poetry circles where thinking is valued over feeling and being. I find that with each of these books, beauty is not an end in itself; these are poems written with rigorous intelligence and attention to music, to how a poem is built with language, metaphor, sound, and image.
The best of these poems have been made by the whole person: the poet has equally engaged heart, intellect, and body in the making. Lastly, these are poems that transcend and include that which is beyond the “I” of the ego, something to which all good poetry aspires.
You have taught poetry over the years. What do you find is the best way into a poetic state of mind for people who are new to the craft?
I have not taught since 2002, when I left teaching to begin graduate studies in psychology (I’m currently training to be a psychotherapist), but think that I would like to teach again. I recently had the opportunity to speak to Reginald Flood’s Introduction to Creative Writing students at Eastern Connecticut State University and was reminded of how much I enjoy interacting with students!
As for getting into a “poetic” state of mind, this is unique for each poet. What helps me is to have quiet and uninterrupted space, even for just an hour or two. In this time I do a good deal of staring into space, daydreaming, ruminating. I also read poems by others, moving intuitively between books, whatever calls to me in the moment. I may do this for some time -- 20 to 30 minutes or so, an hour -- until an image comes (and it’s nearly always an image at first). I may then jot down some notes by hand, or turn to the computer to begin writing -- not a poem, specifically, but the very earliest beginnings of one.
This seems to be my process. It’s not very exotic or unusual. I know that I’m not a public poet -- I can’t write or think well in cafés or other places where there are noises and visual distractions. Most of my poems come from material that has accrued and shape-shifted internally over a long period of time. Sometimes I keep notes in a notebook; I’m not particularly disciplined or regular about this practice, but again, it’s unique to each person. It took me years to even recognize what I needed as a poet. And I’m not a collaborator. I suspect this is pretty typical of most poets. We like to have control over our product!
What has community meant to you in your life of poetry?
As I’m not the clubbable sort, I find myself chafing against the overused word “community,” although your question is entirely legitimate, so I will attempt to answer it legitimately. When I was younger I felt a greater need to be part of a poetry “community”. Graduate school fulfilled this need, to a large extent, as did, for a while afterwards, occasional poetry groups.
These days I feel a lot of ambivalence around the idea of a poetry "community". It’s been challenging to find and sustain a community of poets beyond graduate school, as I’m not affiliated with an academic institution or poetry “clique”. When the opportunity presents itself, I enjoy talking with other poets about poetry, about what we're writing and reading, and about the business of poetry. Facebook, which I joined in December to promote my book, has provided a “community” of sorts, but a limited one (as anything is limited in the virtual world).
At this stage I feel mostly satisfied to plod along in my own meandering, solitary way. I have the likes of Jack Gilbert, Jane Mead, Kay Ryan, and others as my models. I have a small handful of poet/writer friends whom I trust, whose work I respect, whose opinions and insights I value, and, perhaps most importantly, whom I like as people. In time I would like to exchange new work with others, as I do believe this is valuable at particular stages of poem making. In the end, my greatest writing community consists of the poets and writers, both dead and alive, whose work nourishes and inspires me.
Why do you believe poetry is important today?
When has it not been important? I feel like anything I say in response to this question has already been said, and better. But I will say this: the best poetry continually reveals to me what it means to be human. And perhaps this is why it’s important today: we need to reconnect with our humanity before we destroy ourselves and everything around us. It may be too late. But we must try. Poetry is one way.
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Born in Kobe, Japan and raised in California, Guam, and Japan, Mari L’Esperance’s first full-length collection The Darkened Temple was selected by Hilda Raz for the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and published by University of Nebraska Press in September 2008. An earlier collection Begin Here was awarded the 1999 Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize and published in 2000.
L’Esperance’s work has appeared in several literary journals, including the Beloit Poetry Journal, Many Mountains Moving, Poetry Kanto, and Salamander; in Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry by Sage Cohen (Writer’s Digest Books); and is forthcoming in the anthology When the Muse Calls: Poems for the Creative Life, edited by Kathryn Ridall.
A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, graduate of New York University's Creative Writing Program, former New York Times Company Foundation Creative Writing Fellow, and recipient of residency fellowships from Hedgebrook and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, L’Esperance lives and writes in Oakland, California.
