Photo: Michael Kleven |
Be sure to check out Sandra’s latest book, Defiance Street: Poems and Other Writing, which Stoneboat Co-Editor in Chief Rob Pockat reviewed in our Spring 2014 issue, and read on to learn more about this excellent writer.
You have a genuine inclination for aesthetic, whether it be visual
arts, performance, filmmaking, writing, or other forms of creativity. When did you first notice that penchant, and
what inspired you to pursue it?
I love the concept and hope it is true.
A creation of any kind has “content” or subject matter. The work can plainly lay it out like, say, a
tic-tac-toe board, all X’s and O’s.
Plain as milk, simple. Or you can doll up the content, do something new,
add a twist, solder in steel, or work toward laying out X’s and O’s in a manner
never done before. This is one way to see the aesthetic element.
But every “different” thing does not correlate with the
pleasing aspects of a deep aesthetic. Something else has to come into play, and
trying too hard will destroy a house of aesthetic cards.
Cleverness is one way to push the presentation further,
cranking up caution to avoid “cute”—to achieve something more like wit. Maybe, in the style of Dorothy Parker, this
is an aesthetic of entertaining. “All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a
few friends.” (This remark is from the 40’s, when most of us think the world
was square.)
Surprises can elevate the work. I like to wake up the reader, as in these
lines from my own poem, “Remnants:”
Dangerous men have
taken my buttons. My sleeves fly wholly
in the wind. At night they come through
windows. I had to give them something small.
Maybe these lines leave a reader saying, “What the heck?”
curious to read further.
I have a poem titled “BJ.”
The aesthetic of BJ, you could say, actually, is to offer the BJ as
anti-aging treatment. Readers have told me that they argued about whether or
not I meant the common, everyday, BJ. The
last line was the reveal to all but
the cloistered:
Hey, buddy, whip out
that piccolo.
But for that, it’s pretty subtle.
Once your reader knows your proclivities, they can be confident they are right about the territory you appear to be entering. I work to push my boundaries, to enlarge the field of play in pursuit of a certain strange liveliness, a quirkiness of soul. The assault on one’s own sensible limits comes in steps, especially when it relates to exposing sketchy elements of your own history—things parents or your own grown kids might have a choking fit when reading.
Photo: Carmina Kleven |
Then, especially in terms of my adult kids, I stopped
showing them the work. It was no longer
about them. My writing became my work,
my thoughts, my sins, my appetites and creative impulses that ran all over the
boards. They can seek out my published work if they wish, but their cool eyes
at my shoulder would inhibit me. I am close to my kids and, yet, I don’t really
want their feedback.
As I become more captured by the thought that I am making
art, I want to be left alone, free to be outrageous or to explore tender things,
like the body, the sensual, the embrace.
Lord knows I’d be (even) freer in my writing if I lived in an East
Village walk-up, without family everywhere around me. As I move headstrong into each area of
interest, I must forget family oversight. Sharon Olds is a great role model for this. In The Gold Cell, she writes
about her children in tender (and alarming) ways. She also creates a sexual scenario where she
is upended in the living room with some orifice or other, like a lily or tulip
in appearance.
Metaphorical sweat broke out on my forehead, not because it
was erotic, but because it was so daring, and it was not even flattering. I’ll
find the poem…here is her line: “My ass in the air like a lily with a wound in
it.” A very, very brave line, even while
it feels like over-sharing. But screw that. Let her be free so I can be
free.
I have taken aesthetic, here, to mean the extra elements added
to content/subject/theme that move material toward an artistic or pleasing form—at
best to the heights of such form—working in unbounded space, without regard for
who you are pleasing or upsetting. My own intention is the exploration of
thought, form, and experience, allowing the deep creative, the muse-type
miracle, to surface without restriction, when I am so graced. Like in the poem
“Circus, My Circus, “ published in Stoneboat
a couple years ago, I stepped into the center ring, ready or not, because “this
circus is the only show in town.”
Today, the paper reported that among thousands of items at
an archaeological dig near Quinhagak, a wedge was found, made from caribou
antler and decorated with a raven’s foot design. It was decorated with a design
of a caribou hoof. The archeologists say with typical certainty of such
scientists that it must have been repurposed, “once a handle, perhaps,” as such
items were not typically embellished.
This one was embellished. Maybe, they did things different in Quinhagak.
Maybe, one artist carver did things differently in 1640, introducing an
aesthetic to wedges.
The genres in which you write—poetry, creative nonfiction, playwriting,
and children’s books—contain an element of reflection that authors often
struggle with. How do you maintain that reflective narrative while avoiding the
pitfalls of sentimentality or melodrama?
Photo: Carmina Kleven |
I work in the manner prescribed by Richard Rodriquez, among
others. The essay is your stage—perform,
entertain, dance, inspire, be edgy, do something different. Challenge the rules. Do it different, if
difference arises. Be your own persona. Inhabit the work. Do not allow sterility or purity.
I started my thesis so strangely that I am surprised it
survived my own scrutiny. But I dared to present it to the evaluating faculty
members, untouched. No one made a single reference to it. Consider this weird
opening from my thesis, “Defiance Street: The Essay:”
I
walk in poetry’s mansion. Everything is shrouded with sheets, from tables for
toast to all things large. The sheets themselves are shrouded on the shelf
where they are stacked. Down in the root cellar the celery is shrouded. What a
sight, this shrouded celery! The sauna is shrouded; the sun porch, stairs,
salon, the situation, the sun, the sunset, the son, the sonic boom; the sherbet
and the sorbet. The swimming pool is shrouded. Simple things are shrouded.
Sandra is shrouded. The shrouded are getting crowded. Scimitars, slump, soot,
saliva, sloths and the Soviets are all shrouded. Don’t worry. This list is
under control. Everything in the universe that does not begin with the letter S
is shrouded. All the shrouded objects, situations, jokes, epochs, passions,
people (everything!) look like a gathering of common ghosts. This is good. I am
a poet. I have managed the universe with my mind.
Accepted without
a blink or, perhaps, it just slipped by the scrutiny of the faculty.
~~~
I was thinking of writing my early poems. Say, the poems of
my twenties. Title it “Early Poems.” When they are released, people will know
these are fraudulent early
poems.
As time passes, the
fraudulence will be forgotten and, if convincing, the material will come to be
accepted as my early poems. (This imagines a shelf life of a few hundred years.)
Before too long, only a student of Sandra Kleven’s work will know this quirky fact.
The student will announce, “You know, she actually wrote
these so-called early poems later in her life.“
Teacher and students will raise eyebrows, dubious,
“Really?”
“Really, it was a game for her. She wanted to fill in the missing
years.”
“Right…”
You are currently involved in many artistic endeavors. Tell us about
your work with Cirque: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim as well as some of the other projects
you’re working on.
Because I’ve walked with good people down dark roads, I’ve
fractured the cup that once held my naivety; my child-like belief that the best
good would prevail—all of that spilled out like piss. I don’t think everything
is awesome.
So what do you do when you have lost faith? You carry on in
faith. With roots in social work, the movement of the ‘60’s, and as a past
VISTA volunteer I am interested in growth, justice, freedom and community. With
other roots, in pain, loss, and anguish, I like to shake things up and create
new order.
Photo: Sandra Kleven |
Founded by Michael Burwell, Cirque draws from Earth’s cycle publishing on the Solstices with deadlines
on the Equinoxes. How could I have known when I wrote “Holy Land” that a carpet
would roll out that led to Cirque? I
have said, “I was born to this.” I have spent a lifetime getting ready.
Whether doing it as a vocation or avocation, writing is a tough gig.
What advice do you have for emerging writers?
Don’t wait until the work is ready. Moving the work into the
world impacts it, cuts the diamond. The work needs the process of review. Don’t
start a book-length manuscript until you have had some success placing shorter
pieces. It is too easy to get hung up there, to die on the vine, if, after
years smothering in a book-length manuscript, you find no publisher. Too much
time is involved getting to that point. Maybe,
two years, five? Ten? The writer may wait two additional years to learn that
it’s not going to be sold to a major
publisher. The news can be devastating, and it will feel like an indictment of
one’s worth. It is hard to bounce back from this, especially if the writer does
not have other published work that serves to shore them up, to stand as evidence
of worth to the writer, themselves, and to provide the “platform” that a major
publisher may demand.
Rejection may not be a judgment on the writing, but writers
can rarely grasp this fact. If they spent two years writing and submitting in
the shorter forms, they would become a better, more confident writer. They
would know other writers and readers. They would be better positioned to devote
time to a book-length work. In fact, the first book length publication might be
a collection of the earlier pieces. This is the case with my latest book, Defiance Street: Poems and other writing,
reviewed in the current issue of Stoneboat.
Readers and writers often have some kind of metaphysical connection to
authors. Theodore Roethke seems to be almost a spirit guide for you. How did
that connection develop, and how has it guided your work and your aesthetic?
My Roethke period was quite a trip. He wrote that the dead
poets will help you. He gives an example of Yeats visiting him as he worked to
master a particular rhythm. Because of
spending five-plus years with Roethke’s work and those who knew him, I have
friends in Saginaw, Michigan (his home town). I spent a day with his student,
Tess Gallagher, at her home in Port Angeles. With my son, Michael Kleven, I
interviewed his former student and friend, the poet David Wagoner, who just
received a Lifetime Achievement Award from National Endowment on the Arts.
Everything started at the Blue Moon Tavern. In the early 1960’s,
my district friends made a home of the Blue Moon Tavern. I was too young to get
in legally. Roethke was part of this group, even earlier, holding impromptu
poetry seminars in the back. Today his
portrait hangs over the pool table. Roethke died in August of 1963. That summer,
I lived in the most posh digs in the district with my friend, the artist David
Hall-Coleman. Our house was about four blocks from the bar.
As noted, at 18 I couldn’t get in, but it was a home to many
of my district friends: poets, alcoholics, poets who were alcoholics, and a
ragged group of socialists and guys looking to score—drugs or chicks.
In 2009, my son and I made a movie about Roethke, traipsing
through the U-District with an actor playing the poet.
During this period of study, I discovered that about seven
Roethke students went on to become well-known poets. David Wagoner, Richard
Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, Tess Gallagher, Joan Swift, James Wright, Sandra
McPhearson, and others. All had written
about Roethke as a teacher, so I pulled their words from various sources and
created a play with the premise that the former students are visiting a college
classroom to talk about their teacher. The script also includes a chunk of
David Wagoner’s play “First Class,” which allows a Roethke character to show up
and regale the class. It is both touching and hysterical. We recently performed
it in Seattle with a few of Roethke’s real students in the audience, Tess
Gallagher, Joan Swift, and a representative of David Wagoner. Annie Ransford,
who directs the Friends of Roethke in Saginaw, Michigan, was also present.
All of these good things occurred from following Roethke. I
have become friends with all of those mentioned associated with Ted Roethke.
His impact on my verse? Not so much, but
his impact on my life has been amazing. I do at times feel his presence, as in
this poem:
Out of Place in Seattle
“A lively understandable spirit once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait.”
—Theodore Roethke
“A lively understandable spirit once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait.”
—Theodore Roethke
We don’t speak of stones or the
sea in Western Washington. We
use other words in place of these, found out in your poetry.
That’s how I knew you weren’t from here.
We don’t talk the way you do.
It’s an inclination to eschew words like eschew
because you sound too
big for your britches
like I was when I was
little in Seattle
use other words in place of these, found out in your poetry.
That’s how I knew you weren’t from here.
We don’t talk the way you do.
It’s an inclination to eschew words like eschew
because you sound too
big for your britches
like I was when I was
little in Seattle
Crying though the diamond links
crushed by a congress of friends
with you locked up in the violent ward
two Northeast blocks away.
crushed by a congress of friends
with you locked up in the violent ward
two Northeast blocks away.
You came here from someplace
else
to put things differently.
Poetry’s province is elsewhere,
a stone tossed up from the sea,
embedded in the poet’s shoe
one blink from catastrophe.
to put things differently.
Poetry’s province is elsewhere,
a stone tossed up from the sea,
embedded in the poet’s shoe
one blink from catastrophe.
A child kneels at the lip of a wave.
She stretches out her hand to reach for something shiny.
You know what she wants, drawing under weighty water.
Walk weary to the beachhead waiting ’till she follows.
She stretches out her hand to reach for something shiny.
You know what she wants, drawing under weighty water.
Walk weary to the beachhead waiting ’till she follows.
We walk the
weary beaches ‘til clamshells
leave half-moons on ours soles.
leave half-moons on ours soles.
Then you say,
Stop now, Sandy.
You have more than you can use.
Let’s go home.
Stop now, Sandy.
You have more than you can use.
Let’s go home.
The word “busy” is perhaps a gross understatement when describing your
life. How do you fit in time to write, and what is your process?
When too much time has passed without the creation of some
writing I am proud of, I will think, “I have got to write something.” I had that
thought once when I got on the train to Fairbanks. It would be a round trip (each
way, 12 hours at 25 miles per hour). My plan was to write “something.” I knew
that UAPress was accepting pieces of 400 words about the cold, for an Alaska anthology.
I put myself to the task. I wrote a painful little piece, “Open Water.” It made
it into the anthology. Once I got into it, it took about two hours on the trip
up and about the same on the trip back. It is very gratifying to write with
intention and to have something reasonably good arise from it.
I used to write “Morning Pages” in the manner prescribed by
Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way (every
morning, long hand, three pages). I have about four loose-leaf notebooks and
between them, maybe 800, of these never-read pages. Someday they may be the
basis for new work. Maybe, to help me write the poems of my middle years, the
1980’s and ‘90’s. Maybe for my
juvenilia.
Faculty members and others have complained that teaching and
editing will pull a writer away from their own work. But I do have quite a bit
written that still needs a home. When you write more, if it is good, then you
have work to do on behalf of the material you have created. That responsibility
can get quite out of hand.
What can readers expect to see from Sandra Kleven in the future?
Before he invited me to edit Cirque, Michael Burwell asked me to write an essay about Roethke. He
said, "Just do your quirky Sandy thing." So I did, grasping for the first time,
and pleased that my style, my aesthetic, was evident as a “quirky Sandy thing.”
Photo: Michael Kleven |
More than this, I have two very large projects looming. The
first is the establishment of the Alaska Center for the Poem, an organization
to promote Alaskan poets and link them to the larger communities.
The second is a publication, Brandish, which will collect writing that relates to social
services and the “helping” professions in Alaska. It will include critical
essays, memoir, historical accounts and other materials—at the level of a
literary journal. We are open to
submissions, now. Cirque, too, is
open for submissions. If you miss a deadline, we hold it for the next
issue.
Thanks for inviting me into this process. The questions
were the best ever.
3 comments:
This is a great interview, Sandy. Thank you so much!
Sandy Kleven is one of the most interesting people I have ever met. This interview was a delight to read and gave me more insight into how Sandy "ticks" as writer/editor/person.
Amusing and engaging write-up. You’re hilarious. Good humor. saunajournal.com
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