~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Martha Serpas's Interview by Susan Swartwout

DPR: For those readers who are not from Louisiana or nearby, what does it mean to be Cajun? How has your background in Acadia and Bayou Lafourche shaped your life as a poet?

MS: The earliest settlers to my home on Bayou Lafourche migrated from Acadie (Nova Scotia) after being expelled by the British. Eventually Acadiens became Cajun in common speech. The Acadiens mixed with groups of German, Italian, and other Native and European peoples to form distinct farming, trapping, and trawling communities. Today, people who are born into a Cajun community, speak Cajun French or Cajun English and identify with Cajun culture are considered Cajun. I can’t think of anything not affected by being born into a world of paradox: water that is land, people that are clannish and unbelievably hospitable at once, a Catholicism that embodies that welcome, card games that give the highest points to the lowest cards, and the honoring of a mudbug almost above all other foods.

DPR: Your poems in Double Effect often incorporate Cajun French words. How do you decide when to codeswitch with English and Cajun French, for what desired effect?

MS: I speak Cajun English, especially when I am home. That is, the inclusion of Cajun French words and especially English phrases that are direct translations of old French words. (Consider “get down” as a phrase meaning get out of a car—the older meaning of the French is to descend from a carriage). If I codeswitch, I suppose it is between a somewhat formal Standard American English that we all often use to a Cajun dialect more authentic to me. I struggle with the integration because neither feels quite right. My self-narration is NPR. My most comfortable colloquial speech is the flat-A, dropped helping verbs, repeated subjects that most people would associate with Southern Black English. The two dialects share many characteristics.

DPR: Many of our readers are students—of a school or of life in general—and in my experience, one of student writers’ greatest barricades is the fear that their lives had garnered nothing worth writing about, which is always untrue. You’ve spoken in the past about the poet as witness archiving the quotidian events of life. How might one explain the importance of such witness to a beginning writer who believes they have little to document?

MS: Imagine that your whole life has been arranged for you to accomplish a single task, even a gesture. Perhaps you smile at a cashier or you drop a quarter just in time for it to fall down a drain. Generations of your ancestors have lived to get you to that quarter, and generations of your descendants will continue a narrative you will never be aware of. Is any explanation of what is meaningful in life any more plausible than that one? Also, look up the longer passage by Oscar Wilde about a fascinating poet with an exciting life: “He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

DPR: How does your work as a poet inform your work as a hospital trauma chaplain, and vice versa? One action demands that you question everything, and the other—to survive it and its constant connection to pain—demands faith.

MS: The chaplaincy requires me to be present in the moment, which is great practice for being open to poetry. My job is not to console or dispense certainty but to accompany people, being fully aware of what is happening to them internally, spiritually, and emotionally. The interaction is a poem itself, between us a blank page that we are inscribing. I have more faith as a poet than I sometimes do as a chaplain. Faith without doubt is no faith at all, my hero Augustine says. And he is my hero because, at least early in his life, he was brilliant and wrong and full of doubts about God and himself. A great poem is brilliant and wrong and full of doubts and sometimes of epiphanies.

DPR: One of my favorite poems of yours is (what a gem!) “Local Gods,” in which Our Lady of Right Here Right Now opens her arms to the serpent as it opens its mouth to cry. How do you see these two symbols interacting in the poem?

MS: Mary, we tend to forget, said “all nations shall call me blessed” as well as “let it be done to me according to Your will.” At Cana, Jesus deflects her prompt for him to transform water into wine. She blows him off. She knew who she was, and it wasn’t an obedient second-class citizen. So her openness to the serpent, presumably the agent of original sin, is another motif for her power, assuredness, and love. It is hard to accept love when one feels unworthy of it, painful. The serpent hurts my heart every time. I have no idea if any of that is in the poem. It wasn’t for me when I wrote it. And the whole thing has a phallic element, sadly, because depictions of Mary holding open her cloak are descended from fertility images of female genitalia. But that’s another conversation.

Martha Serpas's Poetry and Bio

Martha Serpas's Book Review