Poet, essayist, and critic Kristina Marie Darling asked me some great questions about A Northern Spring. The full conversation is available at Tupelo Quarterly (click the link), along with an excerpt from the book. Here's an excerpt from our conversation:
KMD: I’m intrigued by the many types of silence at play in A Northern Spring, which range from white space, rupture, and elision to purposefully elided narrative context. Can you speak to the power of silence in poetry and the importance of what is left unsaid?
MM: Gary Snyder said something in an interview, probably before I was born—certainly before I was old enough to pick up a date in car—about having to spend as many years un-educating yourself as you spent educating yourself. That struck me when I first read it and has stayed with me as a guiding foundational principle. What’s the authentic me? What parts of me are parts molded by other people and ideas? Can I genuinely separate the former from the latter? Or can I just pretend to? And if all I’m doing is pretending isn’t that as good as the rest?
Maybe asking those questions is its own sort of self-ruse, but questions of that ilk—planted in me by what Snyder said—are part of my creative process. The more I work as a poet and writer, the further away I get from my own formal education, and the more I trust in the instincts of what feels like a buried genuineness, and while that may be a construct, it’s a construct that affects the process and changes the product.
My native dialect isn’t the Standard Written English I teach. My native dialect is Midwestern small-town hick. An undergraduate English professor of mine told me, when I said I thought I’d like to be a writer, that I would never be a writer because of the way that I talked and how that talking permeated my writing. The proficiency I have with SWE has come with a lot of effort over the years, and when I teach it now I always teach it with a caveat near the end of class, using excerpts from David Foster Wallace’s essay “Authority and American Usage,” emphasizing that SWE is but one dialect and likely not the one my students were first proficient in—or will ever be most proficient in—making them just like me. I encourage my students to subvert SWE for purposes of greater justice, etcetera, but counsel them, as do the DFW excerpts I share, that they need to learn it well before they can subvert it, and may well need to employ it in the act of subverting it.
A lot of what you’re referring to comes, I think, from those two principles commingling—me trying to un-educate myself, and me using SWE in the process of trying to subvert it. Throw in, too, my increasing ability, word by word by word over years, to trust the reader. To trust the reader to get it. To trust the reader such that I do not have to over-explain—don’t have to over-anything, but can just do what feels like needs to be done and no more.
I love how the meanings of the word “elision” make the word itself its own yin and yang. It’s alive—is a kind of power—which is also how I see and feel the white space on a page. Placement matters. Look at the walls of any well-decorated or well-orchestrated or accidentally perfect space. What we call “silence” or in the case of spaces “a neutral palette” (or whatever—fill in the blank) is not really silent or neutral (or whatever) at all. If poems emerge at the boundary between the yet-to-said and the saying of—which is the poem—then the white space is alive with all that is yet unsaid, all that is yet unsayable, an aether vast beyond anything we’ll ever get said. The silences are the hope of a kind of eternal, and so are entirely unknowable—which we want them to be because we need that—making them as safe as they are scary.
PHOTO: The book in which I read what Gary Snyder said, one of forty books on my reading list for my MFA comprehensive exams, the questions of which could address the content of any of the forty. In was an all-day essay exam—you got a break for lunch—from the old days of rigor.
KMD: I’m intrigued by the many types of silence at play in A Northern Spring, which range from white space, rupture, and elision to purposefully elided narrative context. Can you speak to the power of silence in poetry and the importance of what is left unsaid?
MM: Gary Snyder said something in an interview, probably before I was born—certainly before I was old enough to pick up a date in car—about having to spend as many years un-educating yourself as you spent educating yourself. That struck me when I first read it and has stayed with me as a guiding foundational principle. What’s the authentic me? What parts of me are parts molded by other people and ideas? Can I genuinely separate the former from the latter? Or can I just pretend to? And if all I’m doing is pretending isn’t that as good as the rest?
Maybe asking those questions is its own sort of self-ruse, but questions of that ilk—planted in me by what Snyder said—are part of my creative process. The more I work as a poet and writer, the further away I get from my own formal education, and the more I trust in the instincts of what feels like a buried genuineness, and while that may be a construct, it’s a construct that affects the process and changes the product.
My native dialect isn’t the Standard Written English I teach. My native dialect is Midwestern small-town hick. An undergraduate English professor of mine told me, when I said I thought I’d like to be a writer, that I would never be a writer because of the way that I talked and how that talking permeated my writing. The proficiency I have with SWE has come with a lot of effort over the years, and when I teach it now I always teach it with a caveat near the end of class, using excerpts from David Foster Wallace’s essay “Authority and American Usage,” emphasizing that SWE is but one dialect and likely not the one my students were first proficient in—or will ever be most proficient in—making them just like me. I encourage my students to subvert SWE for purposes of greater justice, etcetera, but counsel them, as do the DFW excerpts I share, that they need to learn it well before they can subvert it, and may well need to employ it in the act of subverting it.
A lot of what you’re referring to comes, I think, from those two principles commingling—me trying to un-educate myself, and me using SWE in the process of trying to subvert it. Throw in, too, my increasing ability, word by word by word over years, to trust the reader. To trust the reader to get it. To trust the reader such that I do not have to over-explain—don’t have to over-anything, but can just do what feels like needs to be done and no more.
I love how the meanings of the word “elision” make the word itself its own yin and yang. It’s alive—is a kind of power—which is also how I see and feel the white space on a page. Placement matters. Look at the walls of any well-decorated or well-orchestrated or accidentally perfect space. What we call “silence” or in the case of spaces “a neutral palette” (or whatever—fill in the blank) is not really silent or neutral (or whatever) at all. If poems emerge at the boundary between the yet-to-said and the saying of—which is the poem—then the white space is alive with all that is yet unsaid, all that is yet unsayable, an aether vast beyond anything we’ll ever get said. The silences are the hope of a kind of eternal, and so are entirely unknowable—which we want them to be because we need that—making them as safe as they are scary.
PHOTO: The book in which I read what Gary Snyder said, one of forty books on my reading list for my MFA comprehensive exams, the questions of which could address the content of any of the forty. In was an all-day essay exam—you got a break for lunch—from the old days of rigor.