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Interview with poet Susan Swartwout, by Angela Spinzig
AMS: Eudora Welty once said that one place understood
helps us to understand all places better. You were born
in New
Orleans
but
moved
frequently as a
child. How do you think cultural influences from the
south and abroad play a role in your writing?
SS:
A sense of “place” as connected to the writer appears in
most writers’ work, at some time or another—be it as
homeground or as
the location of particular experiences. I find that my
writing returns to the South over and over—no matter
where else I’ve lived—and it’s more than just about
experiences. Although I was in the Midwest for several
decades, that landscape serves mainly as a background
setting to the experiences I had there. I’ve written
about the Mississippi River at Cape Girardeau, about
Chicago and the sense of isolation, and hope for escape
on Illinois’ central plains. Yet the landscape seldom
emerges as an interactive character in the poems.
Read more...
Blue Catfish
It is impossible to see the
angel unless you first have a notion of it.
—James Hillman
As if the mighty river took
a
loyalty oath to shield you
with its body, it floats you deep
and dark as an old family secret,
locks you into the murky depths
where river boats wait their turns
to step down that great water road.
Rivermen swear they've seen
the big one—ten foot long,
pectoral spine like a quarterstaff—
sucking down all manner of garbage
from spillways, a fellow brawler,
lover of stink and the shad-filled slough.
The sins of humans stream past you,
petty grievances of diamond rings and spit,
hate tied in ropes or wire, a tumbling
Frigidaire spectre. Condoms swirl and beckon.
A
truck tire whose afterlife can never unfold
in fire nor water waits for the Apocalypse.
A
man in overalls, laced into a deadwood
tangle, waves a slow salute. Our various guilt
eddies or sinks in dilatory denial past your flat,
jelly eyes. You chronicle the decades and sift
the muddy bottom without judgment,
gargling the poisons,
lipping the death,
unexacting, nature's Cronos, whose pale
blue skin mimics high heaven, rising
from the river darkness like a
heavy soul
or salvation.
Louisiana Ladies’ Watermelon Tea—1890
The photo holds more than pose, cheating
the sepia tone’s formal stare, or the proper places
and laces that display these unwed female forms
like iced cakes. The ladies have shared pieces
of
themselves the camera will never know,
its gaping eye swallowing the scene like a melon seed,
black seeds the ladies squeeze out
between their lips, preening their images in the spit-
wet surfaces.
Three maidens seated on the
floor
smile the secret that floats between them
like a mimosa blossom.
Their chins are tucked in,
eyes half-mooned under lids that seem to smirk
pure pleasure.
One cozies her cheek
against the thigh
of
a beauty who sits in a parlour chair romancing
the camera, bouquet of ferns tucked into her bodice
by one of the others.
Beauty raises her melon
slice
to the camera:
Hey ya’ll, I’ve passed on,
but you can still see
I’m divine.
She widens her eyes so you
can admire
the image of belles, their arched skirts ringing
in memory.
Myths of manhunting,
manipulation, are forgiven in their balm of drawl.
The lady who serves the treat invests everything
in her wrists.
Plain and tall, she blunts
the violence
of
a broad-blade knife thrust half-way to hilt
in
melon by the subtle swan’s neck curve
of her hand into wrist.
Her other arm bends
near her waist, the hand swooning backward, falling
into curled fingers and pale iron
palm.
Center-
poised, she pretends in pose to defer to her friend
who stocks more satin fringe than Maison Blanche.
They glance at each other and smile, yes, sugar.
Keeping these ladies from sweet fruit’s excess
has never been simple. Kudzu layers their menfolks’
eyes.
Even clocks can’t hold us apart from their parlor.
Do
call again tomorrow; nothing will change.
The ladies will be here, their fingers sticky with
boredom.
Winter Again
Cold clings stubborn as 11 pm
in a second-shift dead-end job.
On Route 150 home, my rust-bucket car
slushes a half-inch of midnight snow.
The moon makes a half-hearted
spotlight,
full of scripted promises on this
time-
slowed ghost road, pines zooming
past,
their limbs
raised in disbelief.
Halfway through my heartbeat: a deer
runs sudden next to my car,
runs thunder with its hard velvet
mask,
antlers framed and determined
in my passenger window,
runs with no sign of startle,
runs next to—not away from—the fence,
not flat out racing but leaping,
undulating, skimming the ground,
tossing snow like jet vapors behind,
runs with joy, though I know
I prescribe this, but listen:
A deer ran beside me at midnight
through snow, moon-bright,
appeared from darkness,
stayed with me while an ancient sound
I thought long lost found its way
out of my lungs, then, when
I yelled throat-raw in my sled
of steel and glass, howled down the
shit jobs and lonely nights,
the deer took the hill
by the road in three bounds, leapt
a fence at the top, disappeared
safe into dark like my heart.
The Goddess Discord Brings Her New
Doll Buggy Into My Yard
To Show Off, When I Don’t Want Her
There
Sonnet a deux
We’re born into our language, I’ve been told;
words, pungent as over-ripened fruit, fall
from baby lips like apples from a gold
ancestory. The classic story recalls
past perfect fruit from angry Discord’s hand
marked “For the fairest,” meaning instant war
of
words, for words, that parsed an ancient land—
just as my five-year-old words went too far
when Discord strolled into my own backyard.
None of us liked her. She wasn’t allowed.
She tromped our disdain with her disregard
for “lower class,” so I hollered out, loud,
to
that neighbor girl, from my lingual niche:
“You yellow-bellied, lily-livered bitch”:
old Southern terms I’d heard somewhere like home.
They bounced off nearby dad like a nightmare
echo, words that he didn’t want to own
up
I’m “born into.” Weren’t we a grand pair:
me
under his arm like a sack of Rome
Beauties, him doing the bad dad goose-step
into the house, his mouth just shy of foam-
ing. Inside, the lecture was only prep;
something about acting like a “lady”
and saying I was sorry to Discord
for my lip, but I deemed it too shady
to
be mealy-mouthed to her, the abhorred.
Then his belt swung to strike away words, while
through my tears, I sensed Discord’s placid smile.
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