~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Book Review (excerpt)

Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit by Susan Swartwout

"In Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit, Swartwout guides us through fairgrounds, freak shows, and circuses populated with a sideshow of characters like Electra, the Fat Lady, Tom Thumb, conjoined twins Chang and Eng; all of her deft dazzling exposes both the problematic nature of the term 'freak' and the troubling freakishness of our own nature.  Swartwout, too, knows that each of us create 'attractions' out of our own lives and shape-shift from heroes to freaks and back again.

     "The duality of horror and sympathy is evident in Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit, where binaries are irrevocable. While the freakishness of Eng and Chang deals with our perceptions of normalcy, and our desires for individuality, Swartwout also explores the seemingly normal’s undercurrent of perversity. In 'Louisiana Ladies Watermelon Tea—1890,' the ladies preen their gentility at us from their photograph. The warning to not be deceived by pretty appearances is sharp and well-placed. Swartwout encourages us to see the others around us and inside of us, to recognize, like the gypsy grandmother in 'The Gypsy Teaches Her Grandchild Wolfen Ways,' that 'All tongues tell their monsters, shapes / that shift from human to hell [. . .] They leave howls inside you forever.' Swartwout’s poems are memorable in this same way.

     "Readers should read and reread the work of the works of Swartwout, finding new ways of looking at the world each time. [She] shows that fiction writers don’t have a lock on the reformulation of myth and fairytale, and that contemporary American poetry gives us a tremendous body of work to show us what we are and what we hope to become."

—Christine Butterworth-McDermott, in Pleaides Book Review Volume 14, Issue 2

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.

     The South, however, is a living, breathing entity to me. As a landscape, Louisiana and Georgia, especially, were my childhood mentors, and I can retain many details from that education. Like the smell of delta mud or red clay creek beds drying out in the summers. Or the feel of the tiny, soft seeds we used to glean from the grasses as a fairy offering. Or the electric shock of seeing a snake in the weeds by your feet in that moment before you suss whether it’s venomous or benign. Or the sound of the birds—so many birds!—yakking to each other in the morning’s cool. Or the sight of a big catfish rising slowly from the depths like a lost soul as you reel it in, your hands ready to dodge those barbs.

     One of my chapbooks contains poems about a work trip I took to Honduras. The landscape was crucial to describe, since it tied into the way the Hondurans in the mountains live and interact with others. For example, it’s best to ride a mule, not a horse, on the steep mountain paths. And one should always take a machete when walking through the jungle to visit friends, because the tamagás verde is a viper prolific to the area. And because where I traveled in Honduras is mountainous, the farming occurs on plateaus to which the farmers lower themselves by rope. But the landscape was exotic to me; I was there only a couple of weeks, without sufficient time to “feel” place as a family member in the same way as I did growing up in the South.

     I live in the Pacific Northwest now, in Oregon, and I love the incredibly beautiful landscape here—lots of trees everywhere, mountains, the ocean only a couple of hours away by car. My poetry is beginning to hold more PNW imagery, but I feel that I’m mostly in the reading and observing stages of my relationship with Oregon. I have no doubt it will quickly deepen, because both the landscape and its residents are welcoming and open, and I read a lot. I hope that someday I’ll be nearly as close to this landscape as poet Maurice Manning is with his relationship to Kentucky.

AMS: You’ve recently retired from teaching and publishing at Southeast Missouri State University. But you haven’t slowed down. What projects are you involved in?

SS: I miss both teaching and working with authors and interns in the University Press, but I’m ecstatic about moving forward! It’s quite a luxury to have time to do whatever one wants to do. I still copyedit as a freelancer—scholarly journals and novels—and I do volunteer work in the administrative offices of our city library—mostly programs research, events, and proofreading. There’s a gym just a few blocks away that I go to four mornings a week. I’m working on poems about ageism and others about the environment, both personal/experiential, which demonstrate my growing connection with Oregon, and political poems about capitalism’s blindered view of the environment. And I may be editing another anthology in the near future. Then there’s the gardening. Our house has a large yard, yet when we moved in, there was hardly any flora in the backyard and only two rosebushes on the entire property. Two won’t do. So I’ve been busy with the multi-year project of landscaping and putting in ten more roses, four of which are climbers. As Eudora Welty wrote in “Why I Live at the P.O.,” her perhaps best-loved short story, “Somebody had to do it.”

AMS: How has your time spent in academia informed your artistic progress?  How you were able to fit in your own creative work during this time? Was it important to you to provide a platform for other writers' voices? Did that help with your own writing?

SS: Publish or perish is still a factor in academia, but it’s a good motivator, also, to keep on writing and publishing in a variety of venues. While I was directing the university press and teaching, and stealing moments of personal writing time, I also wrote along with my poetry students in class, when we had an open-writing or prompted-writing exercise. And other writers have always inspired me to keep going—both the writers I published through the university press and writers that I corresponded with during my tenure at the university. Poet and scholar Philip Kolin at University of Southern Mississippi more than once nudged me into a few new poems; and Dixon Hearne, editor of this journal, has inspired me for many years with his own diverse and dedicated writing. There’s no getting around the fact that writing is hard work. I depend upon the camaraderie of writerly friends and of favorite poets, whose poems act to generate more ideas.

     Faced with directing the business of the press, editing books and two journals, teaching, and getting sufficient amounts of writing done to justify my professorial promotions, I often found solace in a quotation by Ford Madox Ford, who did a rather spectacular job with such burdensome elements. He said, “I am a pretty good writer, and a pretty good editor, and a pretty good businessman. But I find it difficult to be all three at once.” Yet he didn’t give up on any of his work. Nor did I, until I retired. I loved it all. And I have found more work that I love.

     There’s nothing quite like bringing the writing of other authors into the world through publishing. Having books published of one’s own is absolutely wonderful but includes anxiety, second-guessing, and a measure of self-deprecation because the book is made permanent in print, yet it’s never perfect. Being a publisher and cheerleader for others was something that filled my heart with joy and enthusiasm. I am especially proud of the books produced through the press’s Nielsen First Novel Award and the Cowles Poetry Prize. Unless you have been involved with book publishing—acquisition, editing, production, proofreading, printbuying, marketing, publicity, funding—you may not realize how much time each book takes to produce. It’s not conducive to one’s own writing at all, because one’s mind is consumed with the particulars of others’ work. Separating the two mindsets was difficult but doubly rewarding.

AMS: How important do you think it is to experiment with form, or to at least have background knowledge of the way certain forms of poetry work?

SS: Crucial! I have made many hundreds of students miserable, momentarily, by insisting that they write a poem in a particular form, but it does have an important purpose, even and perhaps especially with the dreaded sestina. When you must bend your speech patterns and past experiences into a poetic form, you often end up writing words, phrases, ideas that may never have occurred to you otherwise. The sestina requires repeated end-words in alternating, specific order. You have to splay your thinking to match up with that form. Sestinas like to talk, to dwell over obsessions. You have to dig deeper into the subject you’ve chosen in order to turn it over like an agate, to see all the sides of that subject. Many of the students ended up liking the form so much that they wrote more sestinas on their own. The English sonnet is another “gotta-try.” Pouring your ideas and skills into the prescribed form of a patterned poem leads to the generating of other writing for you as a practicing poet. 

AMS: What kind of poetry or aesthetics appeals to you? Any specific example?

SS: Some days, I prefer poems that are accessible to general readers, without, of course, those poems being nothing more than prose broken into lines. Poetry has specific devices that allow it to dwell in a sensual, alternate realm of metaphor and imagery that project thought, meaning, or description in a different way than conversation does. Alliteration and assonance, for example, conjure sounds, while metaphor and imagery paint another version of the subject—one that the reader can “see” in a new light. You can read in prose that “the wet laundry hangs on the clothesline” or, if you have in your hands the poem “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” by Richard Wilbur, you can read about laundry as “Outside the open window / The morning air is all awash with angels.” If you’ve seen laundry on a line, it will be easy for you to see Wilbur’s vision of laundry “like” angels floating in the morning breeze. It’s difficult for me to read that poem, again and again as I do, without my heart hurting a bit because it’s so beautiful. Lucille Clifton and Wislawa Szymborska are two of my very favorite poets because their poems are so succinct, so spare in their words, yet they have so much depth.

     And other days I want a poem that makes me work, think, question everything, go back and read it again and find out it’s turned into a different poem entirely, yet has not stopped challenging me. Anne Carson, Camille Dungy, A.R. Ammons, Susan Howe, Mary Jo Bang are a few of the poets I most treasure for a challenging imagery and wordplay workout.

AMS: You always say “it gets better.” How do you deal with rejection or setbacks in writing?

SS: My advice, to myself and others, is that “rejections mean you’re writing.” If you weren’t writing—work that, either or both, you love and must do—you’d never be getting those rejection slips. And as a former editor, I know that acceptances are part exceptional work, part chance, part finding-the-right-market. You have to keep trying, revise if it makes sense to you, send it out again. I imagine that every practicing writer (meaning those who work to publish, rather than those writers who write for personal purpose) has a personal story or has heard of a story in which a wonderful piece of writing was rejected [insert shocking number here] times. J.K. Rowling is one of the best examples. And, obviously, she didn’t quit. The worst thing you can do is to quit trying because you think a rejection means you’re a bad writer. A rejection slip means that you may need to practice your craft more intensely by reading more and writing more or by taking a writing workshop that will push your skills to another level—or it can simply mean that particular editor chose not to publish it for reasons of space or preference or style conflict or audience.

AMS: Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit is your most recent book publication. Tell us about this collection. It's such an evocative title. Where did it come from?

SS: The title is a combination of two phrases that evoke the South. “Odd beauty” was a phrase that my grandmother in Pascagoula, Mississippi, used to describe someone or something that doesn’t fit the traditional definition of beautiful but is nonetheless lovely and precious in its own right. I loved that phrase because it made inclusive that which ordinarily stood outside social privilege; it allows for the dignity of the unusual, like the so-called “freaks” that I write about who were a major fixture in fairs and circuses in the 1950s and 60s South. “Strange fruit” is a phrase from a poem published in 1937 by teacher Abel Meeropol, who later set it to music as a protest song against American racism, especially the lynching of African Americans. In 1939, Billie Holliday recorded and made it famous. The two phrases—“odd beauty” and “strange fruit”—seem to call to one another in many different ways that I felt reflected both what I was writing and the South, a place that was comforting to me—a privileged white person—yet so tormenting to others who are different in color or body shape or ritual.

     The poems began as a way to explore the world of sideshow “freaks,” a name they call themselves. They survive in an unfriendly world in which their otherness is put on display. They learn to care little for society’s approval, and they’re very inventive in their navigation of the plain world in their entertainment work and in their everyday existence. There’s great beauty in their self-awareness and self-celebration. My heroes are Chang and Eng Bunker, billed as “the Siamese Twins,” who were successful in both areas of home and work. Though physically joined together with a shared liver, they married American wives, had their own homes with alternating living schedules, fathered 21 children, and put them through college. That’s more than most of us ordinary-bodied folk can manage. I admire their strength.

     The rest of the poems examine other differences, such as issues of growing up female in the South—learning, for example, that some language and actions were never allowed for girls—and writing about how the loving and generous families in a tiny Honduran village in a mountaintop jungle, with no electricity or phones or doctors or roads, interact and survive, graciously sharing what little they owned with our work party from the US that came to help them build a school.  

AMS: Your book is described as “Southern poetry with a gothic twist.” What does that mean to you?

SS: The gothic twist is composed of elements like the freak shows, now considered politically incorrect, although I don't recall anyone I knew as a child ever making fun of sideshow folks. One reason was that they were known to be pretty fierce; another, such derision would have gone against our raising. Southern gothic goes beyond freaks, into the socially unaccepted manifestations of anyone's character or body. Politeness may be our Southern training, but sharing dark secrets is our art.