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The "Byzantine light through the sprinklers": The poetry of Sharon Thesen
Sharon Thesen is making coffee in her kitchen and telling me about her upcoming reading with Robin Blaser on July 26th at the Roundhouse. The black labrador has spread itself on the linoleum and is panting in the heat with a strength and endurance that would have made Charles Olson proud. It's been one of those summer days that grabs you by surprise, taking away the sour light of overcast skies and replacing it with something more comfortable. Amidst all this, I am struck by how closely Thesen's life parallels her poetry.
Thesen acknowledges that Blaser will fulfill the "worldliness" quotient for the reading. She seems a little concerned that her own work might not stand up to Blaser's new, exotic experiences. However, I believe Thesen holds a simple, unalterable pride in the local, immediate pleasure that is intrinsic to her poetry (see "I Drive the Car"). She has a way of making the unfamiliar familiar by the simple act of writing a cassoulet and plastic chairs into the same poem. In her own words, Sharon Thesen's work is the "Byzantine light through the sprinklers."
Thesen is the author of five books of poetry: Artemis Hates Romance, Holding the Pose, The Beginning of the Long Dash (nominated for the Governor-General's Award in 1987), The Pangs of Sunday and her latest collection, Aurora. As an editor, her work includes The New Long Poem Anthology published by Coach House Press. Thesen teaches English and Creative Writing at Capilano College.
The Peak: How do you remember in a poem? In "Rose Window" you write that you are "trying to remember." That really struck me because it made me think to what purpose is this memory serving you and how is it that you are accessing that memory?
Sharon Thesen: Memory has been so darkened since Freud. It is seen as something that hides rather than reveals. It serves as something to protect us against that which is unbearable rather than to make the unbearable something we have to deal with as thinking and writing human beings. Memory is associated with the worst sorts of nationalisms and with the best efforts of a people to retrieve its culture and keep it alive. Lest We Forget is the warning that we must always remember- and that if we don't remember we are doomed to repeat history.... Memory itself is something that is loaded with suspicion, darkness and fear.
Take for example the controversy surrounding false memory syndrome-we wonder if the memories are really true or false. It has been shown over and over again that imagination immediately grabs hold of memory and shapes it into something that the body or the soul or the mind can use, or something that can fit into the general integrity of the individual or the culture or what we need to be able to go on.
The question of memory in poetry seems to me, at least fairly lately, a question of content and a question of remembering in order to bring forward the pain which the poem will heal. Whether that pain is personal, cultural, racial or... even intellectual, I suppose. I tend in my own work to be shy of what I call large memory or heavy memory or darkened memory. I want to invite the playfulness of memory which some could call lying or just making things up. It's the redemptive spirit of art on history. If I'm dealing with the memory of another person, I don't want to make them do things they don't want to do. Trying to "remember" is also a way of re-entering a realm of pleasure and a realm of a certain kind of work and of getting things right.
The Peak: You just mentioned that you don't want to make people do things they don't want to do... how committed are you to maintaining and supporting the facts and factual events in your writing?
Thesen: I think that I exaggerate and do that consciously in the language of the poem. I trivialize. I'm currently writing a poem about some bikers that rode in when we were at Lund. They think they are so tough. They probably are. There is this whole sense of self importance that I'm trying to puncture in the poem. Apart from dates and place and geographical intersections, facts are really hard to pin down. I'm more interested in the truth... but then that gets us really off track. I think it would annoy me if someone attributed to me something that I didn't do.
The Peak: You don't want to misrepresent anyone....
Thesen: But misrepresentation is so much for me a corrective for the representations in the world that are somewhat false or misguided. In a sense, I want to retrieve real representation from the misrepresentation that passes as representation.
The Peak: There is an intense amount of movement in the poem "Aurora." It really draws the tongue up and down. How are important are line breaks and structure to you? What measures do you take to create this movement?
Thesen: Literally, in this poem, it's the device of the computer screen. I go as far across the line as it'll take me. These lines end very carefully. When I move to that margin, that precipice, I know that the mechanism of the machine is going to take over and make me start another line where I might not want to. The line has whatever breath I can blow into it and it has a terminus determined by the margin. It's just like writing on an 8.5x11 page or anything else. There is a momentum that gets going through that line. A lot of it was influenced by the chants of the eastern orthodox church I was listening to on CDs that summer. There is something in those lines of the breath of chant although it is without the gravity of chant. I think the movement you're talking about is what it takes from the sacramental quality of voice. It's without the heaviness, without the seriousness.
The Peak: Robert Kroetsch writes in "Why I Went Up North and What I Found When He Got There" about having to go away to write. Do you have to go away to write?
Thesen: No, but that's assuming you have the pleasure and the satisfaction of roots. I don't really feel that myself, I don't feel rooted anywhere. I suppose if I grew up in the same house in the same neighbourhood and went to the same schools as everyone else I might have to go somewhere else to get a jab of inspiration or something new. Experiences of strangeness make me silent. I'll write a lot of journal stuff, but as far as writing, no. I need my coffee pot, I need my phone, I need my books, I need to be able to get out of the house and know where I'm going. I find strangeness and unfamiliarity in that way quite overwhelming. Wonderfully overwhelming, but certainly not conducive to writing. I feel myself, if I were to go to some far away place, I would have to stay there a very long time and learn the place before I could write its history. It needs to have its effect on me.
The Peak: Do you agree with the philosophy of poetry recollected in tranquility? Did you have to wait until you got home to push your experiences through the sieve of language?
Thesen: I don't believe it, frankly. That way of describing it is far too mechanistic. It doesn't come close to the turmoil and confusion of recollection, inspiration or writing. Certainly if you've had a horrible traumatic experience probably the emotion at the time in so overwhelming that all you're going to write are words connected with your emotions, and you're not going to be able to connect with something richer and more social which is feeling. Recollecting in tranquility doesn't feel true to my experience. Maybe painters can recollect things like that. When you're with language you're in another boat completely. You can never recollect anything-it's always there.
Other experiences which a poet will find really rich and be really compelled to write about I won't breathe (and I mean this literally) a word of in my poetry. Someone reading my poetry would be really hard pressed to recreate any semblance of a biography-at least any biography I would recognize.
The Peak: On writer's block: "The Watermelon" speaks of how there is nothing Southern in you. What is this Southern thing?
Thesen: I think what I was accusing myself of, or the persona of the poem, was a deficit in the ability to let fly, that Faulkneresque Southern, that gift of the gab.... One of my mother-in-laws was Southern and that woman could not stop talking, would not stop talking and everything that came out of her mouth was interesting and flavoured and lovely. I envied her-that ability to articulate. I think poets are some the most inarticulate people-or at least they feel that way. I'm not a novelist because I simply can't articulate like that. Southern becomes everything I'm not. I'm Northern, I belong to this place, you know, austere, crimped and constipated. It's the clichˇ and kitsch of the Northerner that I'm working with here.
The Peak: You talked about not feeling articulate enough to write fiction. Does that mean you see poetry as a stepping stone for prose?
Thesen: No, I don't-despite evidence to the contrary involving some of the better novelists in Canada, Anne Michaels, Lola [Lemire Tostevin], although Lola, I think, would consider herself always a poet-I'm sure Anne does too. But the world considers poetry to be secondary to prose. I think poetry really is a completely separate form of the articulation of language. I've tried to write fiction. I cannot write fiction. I get about five lines into the story and then I start taking it apart or undermining it. The way my mind works, it is not fitted to writing fiction.
The Peak: In "The Watermelon" you write, "I suppose Sharon Olds has just finished another/ fabulous poem about her child's scalp." Is this a comment on your different styles of composition, your different creative processes?
Thesen: I was at a workshop with Sharon Olds. It astonished me with what facility she is able to write these finely crafted, closured, integral poems practically at the drop of the hat. She even has "moving" subject matter. It made me think, golly, I haven't written any poems about my kid, or my husband, or my family, or my lover, or my feelings and yet she, the other Sharon, is able to do this with such facility. There is a slight action of pricking the balloon of importance here. I do remember a line from one of her poems about her son's scalp-he'd cut himself. You know how she's always in there-in the wounds [laughter]. I thought, "oh, spare me."
The Peak: What was it like for you to have a child and to be a poet?
Thesen: It was such an exhausting time in my life... working at the college full time, trying to write, doing readings, trying to keep a household going-it all passed in a kind blur. Thank god I was young. It wasn't easy in terms of the limited energy you had to bring to your work.
On the other hand, having a child around is to be constantly in the field of a child's language and perception of the world. I think that can be very inspiring to be in the presence of that innocence that drops away as more and more language is acquired.
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