Kate Duthu's Interview with Jeanette Willert

POET INTERVIEW Jeanette Willert by Kathleen Duthu  

     Born in West Virginia, the heart of Appalachia, Jeanette Willert writes frequently about her experiences growing up in a coal-mining family there. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies. She earned her Master of Arts and PhD in English Education from SUNY Buffalo. After more than three decades teaching high school students, she became an assistant professor at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY and served as the Director of the Western New York Writing Project before retiring as Chair of the Education Department. Fifteen years ago, she and her husband Richard moved to a log home on a lake near Birmingham, Alabama to be closer to her daughter and grandchildren. In retirement, Jeanette enjoys reading, writing, and participating in her poetry group and the Alabama State Poetry Society. Her chapbook, Appalachia Amour, won the 2017 Morris Memorial Chapbook Award. Negative Capability Press published her first full-length book of poetry, it was never Eden, in 2021 and it was awarded the 2021 Book of the Year by the Alabama State Poetry Society. 

    I spoke with Jeanette via Zoom while she sipped a morning cup of coffee at her desk, the sturdy wood beams and walls of her log home visible in the background. Both transplants to the deep South, we shared experiences of being out of our comfort zones and our unexpected love of small-town Waffle House restaurants. Jeanette appreciates the Waffle House servers at the Pell City, Alabama location regularly allowing her to occupy a booth to read and write long after they’ve cleared away her plate.

KD:  As a former English teacher and college professor, who were your favorite poets and authors to introduce to your students? 

JW:  I taught English literature for about 35 years and American literature for a few years. I especially enjoyed teaching John Donne and Shakespeare and using lesser-known works to show different sides of the poets. Not surprisingly, students liked Donne’s poem, “The Flea,” because the speaker tries to persuade a woman to have sex with him. Shakespeare’s poem “Winter” would inspire students to write their own poems about winter scenes around their own homes, which were plentiful in New York. I also liked teaching about the Beat poets, particularly Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his poem, “Christ Climbed Down.”  

KD:  When did you start writing your own poetry? Why did you decide to publish your first your book at this point in your life?

JW:  I first wrote romance novels while I was teaching then decided to go back to graduate school for my PhD in English Education in the 1980s after a publisher initially accepted then rejected one of my novels. When my husband and I moved to Alabama, I wanted to do something meaningful in retirement and found a local writers’ group. Most of the members were producing poems so I started with ten or twelve poems and now have about 250. The leader of the writers’ group encouraged me to submit to contests, magazines, and journals, which led to the collection for it was never Eden. I plan to publish more full-length poetry books.

KD:  After reading your book, I can picture your coal-mining hometown of Kincaid, West Virginia, the Kanawha River, and the surrounding mountains. Do you still feel an intimate connection to West Virginia even though you haven’t lived there since you were a young newlywed? 

JW:  West Virginia will always be home, but things have changed since I grew up there. The only venue, other than a post office, left in my hometown is the Glen Ferris Inn where people associated with nearby chemical and metal plants stay. Hawks Nest State Park, a fabulous spot nearby, also brings some visitors. The newest national park is contiguous to the town where I grew up. I still have cousins living in that area and follow news and social media sites connected to the state. Outside interests run the state and aren’t interested in the welfare of the people, a very high number of whom live in poverty.

KD:  Many of the poems seem autobiographical but explore universal themes including loss of childhood innocence, falling in love, and growing old. How do you want readers to relate to your poetry even if they’ve never been to any part of Appalachia? 

JW:  Geography is important, but human situations and experiences supersede place. Going to a funeral, attending a family reunion, or visiting a loved one in a nursing home are easily relatable. I’ve published several poems in an anthology of writers with ties to Appalachia, but the works reflect life, not just mountain life. 

KD:  You were not afraid to address some of the difficult parts of your family history, including racism by your relatives. What led you to write the poem “Beyond blood & bone,” which imagines how you would have a present-day conversation with your great-grandfather from Virginia who fought for the Confederacy and named his children after Confederate heroes? How and when did you learn about him in your family?    

JW: I didn’t learn about my great-grandfather until I researched on Ancestry.com. My family focused on present day problems. My grandmother passed away when I was fourteen so I probably wouldn’t have been interested if she had talked about her father. As another poem describes, I found an old black and white photo of the Ku Klux Klan. My mother didn’t say anything about it, but I knew she shared her relatives’ racist attitudes. Fortunately, I escaped that prejudice. I attended a newly integrated high school in the 1950s and participated in a jazz band with both Black and White students. The band was led by a wonderful Black director who had played on the road with Count Basie.  We all loved him.

KD:  One of your poems, “Pandemic: March 26, 2020,” is very timely as we continue to face new variants of COVID-19. How has the pandemic impacted your writing? What were the challenges of releasing your book in 2021?

JW:  I taught my students about the bubonic plague but never imagined we’d live through our own plague. I was very productive during the first year of the pandemic even though my writing group didn’t meet. I wrote the pandemic poem because I thought how strange it was to sit outside with friends watching nature spring to life around us, but we were socially distanced from one another because we knew the coronavirus could kill us. The pandemic, along with two hurricanes in south Alabama, delayed Negative Capability Press publishing the book until late 2021. I hope to have a few public readings and book events this year. 

KD:  As a transplant to the deep South, what do you enjoy about retirement living in central Alabama after working in Buffalo, New York for many years?  I imagine you don’t miss shoveling snow during long winters. 

JW:  I like that spring now comes in February instead of May—it’s my favorite season. When I first retired, I tried painting for a few years but decided I’d need formal instruction to go further. Then I focused on writing but have avoided a rigid schedule like I had working as a teacher for so many years. Some days I write for several hours, but  other days I don’t write at all. When my husband and I moved to Alabama, I hadn’t considered the challenges of being a New York liberal in a conservative area and still sometimes feel out of my comfort zone in the South. 

KD:  If you could be sitting anywhere in the world drinking a morning cup of coffee right now, where would it be and who would be with you?  

JW:  In Paris at a café on the Champs Élysées with a view of the Arc de Triomphe. I felt at home in Paris during my three visits but don’t think I’ll make it back there again. With me at the café I’d like Rumi, one of my favorite poets, and Shakespeare, whom I just love. I’d also like to talk with Jesus and ask him about how difficult it was to spread his messages of caring and loving people, especially during the days of the Roman Empire.

KD:  Publishing your first book of poetry at the age of 80 is an inspiration for me. What advice do you have for “older” writers who have struggled to find the time, motivation, or confidence to create and put their work out into the world? 

JW:  The publishing world is not overly fond of older white women writers. Yet, when you are a writer, you write. . .regardless. I have been fortunate to “fall in” with a group of Alabama poets who are very encouraging. I have also had good luck in getting many of my poems in journals and anthologies.  My advice?  Write! Try local and regional sites for getting started publishing. Join a writing group. Join your state organizations for writers. Get out and meet those people!

Sam Taylor's Innovative THE BOOK OF FOOLS forthcoming

Negative Capability Announces the Publication of Sam Taylor’s Innovative Eco-Epic

Negative Capability is proud to announce the forthcoming publication of The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse, Sam Taylor’s innovative third book of poems, is slated for release October 14, 2021. At once poem, essay, memoir fragment, and art object, The Book of Fools is a sweeping elegy for our earth—and our plastic-choked ocean—and it is visually, conceptually, and thematically unlike perhaps any book before it. 

A National Poetry Series finalist, The Book of Fools invents new formal structures to marry global, ecological themes of loss—focused around the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—to personal, confessional ones, centered around a mother’s early death to cancer. By utilizing innovative lyric techniques within the larger arc of an accessible narrative, the book endeavors to create a contemporary (anti-)epic for a crisis almost beyond the scale of imagination. 

Taylor is the author of two previous books of poems, Body of the World (Ausable) and Nude Descending an Empire (Pitt Poetry Series). Known for poems ranging in theme from ecology to mysticism, sexuality, and social justice, Taylor has made each book a unique statement. Now The Book of Fools offers a grand elegy for our earth in a book-length poem that is deeply personal and highly innovative. The poet David Keplinger called it “a masterwork: a modern epic that drives toward our planetary grief with exhilarating invention.” Donald Revell described it as “[a] ravishing text” and a truly new and absolutely necessary disturbance in the field.” And poet Craig Santos Perez described it as “a haunting journey into the (under)worlds of personal loss, global inequity, and ecological disaster. Just as the characters and mythic figures in this book cross borders, the poems traverse the aesthetic terrains of lyric and narrative, while also experimenting with typographical innovation (erasure, footnotes, strikethrough, greyscale, and more). Taylor brilliantly creates a ‘composite canvas’ to capture what it means to make art in our precarious times.”

 Taylor lived for several years as a caretaker for a wilderness refuge that was deserted and snowed-in during the long winter, without phone, electricity, or internet, an experience that helped inspire the enduring ecological commitment in his work. A recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and residency awards from the Corporation of Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center, Taylor has published work in such publications as The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, AGNI, EcoTheo Review, Orion, Narrative, Massachusetts Review, Adroit Journal, and Cincinnati Review. His work has been featured or reviewed in Poetry Daily, the PBS NewsHour, Poetry International, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. A former Michener Fellow at UT-Austin, Taylor is an Associate Professor at Wichita State University, where he directs the MFA program and tends a wild garden.

Among its many innovations, the poet’s experiments in “self-erasure” create a polyphonic reading experience and deepen its journey into the underworld. Possibly the first practitioner of self-erasure, Taylor wrote many of the first self-erasure poems in the book in 2010, but continued to work for nearly a decade to shape the larger arc of the book and blend the self-erasure with other innovative structures. The Book of Fools represents the mature fruit of these experiments, a daring book-length poem that takes head on the fate of our planet. 

The book will be available in both a text edition ($20) and an illustrated edition ($24) that includes color prints of works by Matisse, Picasso, and Van Gogh, as well as plankton photography by Christian & Noë Sardet. The illustrated edition is also available in a Limited First Edition ($27), available only from the publisher and author, with a vellum flyleaf, illustrations on matte paper, and wider format.

Featured Poet Carey Scott Wilkerson with Interview by Sue Walker

Carey Scott Wilkerson, Ph.D., Georgia State University is a poet, dramatist, and opera librettist. His opera libretti and plays have been produced in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Millikin University (Decatur, IL), Pasaquan (Buena Vista, GA), and Frankfurt, Germany. (Scott has asked us to note that his opera collaborators include the composers James Ogburn, Robert Chumbley, and Angela Schwickert.) His poems have appeared in numerous journals including Negative Capability, Muse/A, The MacGuffin, Sanctuary, and The James Dickey Review. He edited (with Melissa Dickson) our anthology of Georgia Poems Stone River Sky. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Columbus State University and a member of the Core Writing Faculty in Reinhardt University’s Low-Residency Creative Writing MFA program. His new collection of poems Cruel Fever of the Sky has just been published by Negative Capability Press.

Falling

Sue Walker (SW): Your new book, Cruel Fever of the Sky, begins with “Descending Order,” a poem that slows down the fall of Icarus for the length of a sestina and serves as your opening argument. Its final line reads: “Desire is always falling from the sky.” That looks to me like the decoder ring for many of the poems in this collection. And there’s a bit of wordplay here, yes?

Carey Scott Wilkerson (CSW): Right on both counts. Desire in all its forms rains down on us from the moment we learn to dream. Moreover, to desire—the act of desiring— is to find oneself always falling, like Icarus, from some unimaginable height, having failed to do some impossible thing. I should say, by the way, that I’m not cynical about any of this. I’m essentially an optimist. I feel that the image of Icarus has been misunderstood at the margins: he’s not an arrogant brat who can’t follow instructions but, rather, a visionary who wants to live or die on his own terms. Of course, that’s probably going too far, but that’s how I see it. I also tend to make crazy statements about my own work when I can’t think up anything smart to say. 

SW:  Well, let’s go with that—many of the characters in these poems are observed in exactly that moment when an odd decision or “crazy statement” sets them up for a fall of some kind, a downward emotional or metaphysical trajectory, maybe a sense of helplessness, and occasionally an actual fall! Even your “realistic” poems have a vaguely surreal or dreamlike quality and the more openly surreal poems are anchored in reality.

CSW: Yes, we see a romance collapsing at the end of a Ferris wheel ride, which is connected somehow to Sisyphus and a memory of gardenias. We see The Three Little Pigs—now retired and living in a gated community—realize during a hurricane how much they miss the terror and exhilaration of life with the Big Bad Wolf. Someone has a first kiss while watching Sky Lab re-enter and blaze through the Earth’s atmosphere. And someone does in fact have an epiphany while staring at the night sky after slipping on a banana peel in a Kroger Parking lot. Is there any other place under Heaven where such a perfectly absurd event can happen? Maybe a Piggly Wiggly. Gentle surrealism is the native tongue of my poetics.

Form

SW: A mutual friend of ours, Eugenia Gaultiero, points to your facility with forms and the general idea of formal restraint in this book. Is that part of your project here?

CSW: I wish I could claim that I consciously tried to direct the energies of my poetic obsessions through elegant forms, but the truth is I just staged these poems in ways that felt intuitively correct. And sometimes, that required forms. But Eugenia is right in the sense that this book has a more intentional view of forms. It’s not news, but I’ll say it anyway: forms are magical and readily answer the call from wilder realms.

SW: What are those “wilder realms?”

CSW: Imaginative experience, dreams, Los Angeles at night, anywhere in Georgia or Alabama. All places, all spaces of beauty and mystery.

SW: Forms can be liberating, too. Don’t you find that part of the joy in working with forms is in the freedom to experiment and re-imagine certain rules?

CSW: No question about it, particularly once you begin to speak in the natural language of the form itself. Then you see possibilities open up, for instance, at the turn of a sonnet or that precarious fourth stanza of a sestina.

SW: Or the escalating problems of a terza rima!

CSW: Or poets talking shop! And you’re right about the terza rima. It’s like playing chess against oneself. Still, the game of forms is a delight. “Descending Order,” the sestina you mentioned earlier in this chat, was selected by the editors at The MacGuffin as one of the representative poems for their “all formal poetry issue” in 2020. I must admit that was gratifying. Of course, none of it would matter if there were not also interesting stories to tell. And I think the experience of falling through this book is perhaps one of one of those interesting stories.

SW: What do you mean by that?

CSW: Just that I hope this book, even in its exotic moments, hits the familiar harmonics of how life is lived at the ground level. At one point, I show Icarus falling into the lovely Chattahoochee River and then, later, eating cornbread and hot pepper jelly with a country witch. She doesn’t judge him. She repairs his wings “with the names of her favorite clouds.”  That’s how we do in the South.

Fever

SW: So, we all attempt Icarus’s flight and risk that same fall?

CSW: In our own ways, yes. We’ve all come down with a cruel fever of the sky. It’s an inescapable condition of being human.

SW: Is there a cure, a vaccine? I think I know how Carey Scott Wilkerson will answer this question…

CSW: Be my guest!

SW: Art, love, and faith.

CSW: Yep. What else is there?

The Acceleration of Gravity                        

for Mayhaley Lancaster of Coweta County

(1875-1955: feminist, unlicensed attorney,

fortune teller, and wise mind whom many

thought to be a witch.)

It’s not later than supper when,

as from a tale no one quite believes,

Mayhaley Lancaster—seamstress, notary,

and the county’s own witch—

looks up to see Icarus splash

into the Chattahoochee River.

She rows out to meet him in a boat,

stitched together from pine splinters

and biscuit dough: it’s a conversation piece

to be sure, though strictly speaking mostly

a matter of timing as she has just set the table.

Of course, this has happened before

and is an open secret around here:

Leonardo in his proto-helicopter, the Wright Brothers,

and Santa Claus, all arrived in the same way—

wet and confused but, like Icarus, coherent enough to eat.

She pours sweet tea and salts some tomatoes.

He complains about mythology

and being trapped inside a narrative,

lost in the bog of legend.

She fills his plate with butter beans

and cornbread fried on the stove.

Icarus laments the contradictory relationship

between history and memory.

Mayhaley discovers some of last year’s

hot-pepper jelly in the back of the pantry.

He apologizes for talking so far above her head.

She forgives him for being neurotic and aloof.

Mayhaley repairs his wax wings with a quilting knot

she learned in town. Icarus signs her guestbook

both in English and in Greek. They shake hands

under the April sky in a crescent of Georgia light,

and in a flourish, he flies back into his story.

 She observes this from the middle of the Chattahoochee

in a boat she stitched together from bee wings,

Paraffin wax, and the names of her favorite clouds.

Summer’s End

 We were boys somewhere between Star Wars

and the swarm of girls on purple bicycles

buzzing in driveways and knowing far more

than us about the world—these oracles

of the neighborhood, who had begun in spring

a coordinated campaign of whispering

sundresses and secret plotlines, quoting

made-up love songs and explaining nothing.

John Chancellor warned that Skylab was falling

out of its orbit, so we searched for fiery signs

together, forgot our names and our parents calling

us to our homes among sleeping roses, silent pines.

NASA said the wreckage rained over Australia,

but I swear we saw it blazing over Alabama.