ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com

Poetic Profile

Lea Graham

General Questions

1) Where were you Born and what was your Formation?

I was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1967.  My dad was in school there and my mom was working as a nurse at St. Jude's Hospital.  Memphis is such a strong and strange part of my early mythology because I only lived there in my first year of life and yet there are all of these details about it that hang around:  my mother's picture with Danny Thomas, the great spokesman of St. Jude's, was on billboards off the highway, I was born in the same hospital as Lisa Marie Presley...stuff like that which still seems both small town and grand all at once.  I guess the other thing that was odd for me as a kid was knowing that my mom had worked with all of these children who had died of leukemia.  I still have this pastel drawing that one of them did for her while I was still in utero.  It sort of haunted me as a kid.

I grew up in Northwest Arkansas.  My dad's family is from Van Buren near the Arkansas River; my mom's family is from just outside of Fayetteville, Arkansas which is part of the Ozarks.  I think a lot about rivers and mountains.  Whenever I read Robert Duncan's "The Opening of the Field," I am reminded of my grandparents' fields and what foundational landscapes those were for me.  When my parents split up, we went to live near my maternal grandparents in a tiny town called Greenland.  They were dairy and chicken farmers.  We used to stay with them quite a bit in this 19th century stone farmhouse.  My brothers and I would sleep up in the attic which was not exactly "elegant,"  but smelled of old wood and paper-- and always a hornet's nest lodged in the corner of the wall.  There were crates and crates of Reader's Digest and National Geographic that I worked my way through.  I was the best joke teller in my 6th grade class thanks to Reader's Digest.  Also, they had lots of books--lots of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens-- that I read, that I escaped into.  My grandfather was an autodidact, who used to read dictionaries and encyclopedias so I always got the message that reading a lot was worthwhile-- which, of course, I'm grateful for. 

I would say another important part of my formation was my experience traveling in Latin America and working with Central Americans in exile.  The first job I had out of undergrad was in Plainfield, NJ at the Center for Central American Refugees.  My boss was in exile from El Salvador and had worked with Archbishop Oscar Romero.  I learned an amazing amount about the world in a very short time.  I used to drive these guys from El Salvador, Nicaragua or Guatemala to the INS office in Paterson, NJ to renew their green cards.  I would always get lost because there was constant construction.  So there I would be thinking about William Carlos Williams--if only peripherally--while trying to reassure clients: "no se preocupe, no estamos perdidos"-- don't worry, we're not lost.  Of course, we were lost and I was always worried, but it always seemed to work out.  I guess from all of this-- my childhood and this early adult experience, I acquired, as one of my teachers used to say to me, my "messianic tendencies."

2) What are your Poetic Influences?

Well, early on, of course, I was influenced like so many poets my age by William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson.  It's funny now because even as I love the poets of the New York and Black Mountain Schools, my contemporaries have a great influence on me.  I will be reading Denise Levertov, Hilda Morley or Frank O'Hara alongside my good friends, Garin Cycholl and John Breedlove or the Canadian poets, Rob McLennan and Dennis Cooley.  Also, I studied with Michael Anania, Sterling Plumpp, Ray Gonzalez, Ralph Mills, Jr., and early on with Wayne Zade, all of whom had a lot of influence on me-- Anania in particular.  Each of them in their own way helped validate my "poetic materials."  In addition, I try to talk with other writers and artists.  My friends who are essayists, playwrights,  nature writers, photographers and printmakers all help to inform me and move me outwards in some way.

3) When did you become a poet?

There are two instances that I think of:  the first was when I was a sophomore at Fayetteville High sitting in a hallway near my locker and in a fit of teen angst reading Williams' "This Is Just to Say."  It was the plums that did it.  I just thought how marvelous to capture the sensual in such a simple way!  The second instance was when I was 20 years old and in college at Westminster College in Fulton, MO.  The poet, Carolyn Forche, came to read.  It was the first time that I realized that writing and poetry, especially, could have a force in the world-- could really do something.  Also, Forche herself was wonderful-- charming, beautiful, well-traveled, smart and had studied so many languages.  She was also someone who appealed to my desire for justice.  How could any young woman of my background and tendencies not want to be that?!

4) What do Crush poems mean?  

I started writing the "Crush" poems a few years ago because of my students.  It hit me one day that during spring the campus just becomes thick with hormones.  There's a buzz, a change that goes beyond the warmer weather or the hollyhocks pushing up through the mushy ground. I began to think about that-- the changes that come over us as we get crushes-- inspired, of course, by my observations of googly-eyed students or the shorter skirts, the changed expressions, etc.  I was also reading a lot of Anne Carson at the time--one of my favorites and began thinking about the "space" that drives desire or the most subtle movement that captures our attention-- the turn of a hand, the lift of the chin-- what changes everything.  I also began thinking of crushes in an extended way, questioning them as someone approaching middle age.  I was talking to my friend, the essayist, Anne Geller, who told me "crushes aren't bad."  From that conversation I began to think about how I "crush" over more than just people (although I am prone to a lot of people crushes!)  The series has a life of its own now and takes up film and painting, music and memory as its subject matter.  The one that I'm thinking of right now has to do with a Childe Hassam watercolor called "Big Ben" which I saw last fall in Baltimore.  It was interesting in that the painting is clearly London, but in an instant I moved into thinking of Chicago and all of the places I worked or used to hang out in with friends-- the Back Room, the Matchbox or Gold Star-- and all because of the kind of wet sheen that the painting gives which somehow reminded me of Chicago.  I love the turn of the poem and the way memory and imagination work as a changing.

5) Favorite Team or Sport?

For years I was subjected to the Arkansas Razorbacks!  I love what C.D. Wright says about this-- how she never "got it."  I felt the same.  However, I love sports and anyone who has seen my shoulders knows that I lift weights!  I think that's another story though....

6) Food?

I love the Latin/Caribbean diet of rice, beans and a lot of fresh fruit-- pineapple, mango, papaya-- or "fruta bomba" as they call it in Sto. Domingo.  But I also love all kinds of cheese, good bread and great wine.  Honestly, the only food I can say for a fact that I don't like is pata de res (cow's feet). 

7) Vacation Spot?

So many places...I'd go back to Cuba given the chance.  I have loved traveling in Latin America: the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Mexico. I also have loved every place I've been in Europe-- most recently, Vienna and Prague.  A few years ago, we went to Kenya with good friends and that, too, was amazingly interesting.  So I guess my favorite spot is everywhere I've been and everywhere I've yet to go!

8) Swear Word?

Fuck.  I always make my students look up its etymology.

9) Lea as a woman writer of a certain age (ed note the editor and the profilee are the same age), what early influences prompted you to write?

Well, you and I were talking about this the other day, weren't we?  Besides what I said earlier about being influenced in college by Carolyn Forche, I would say that growing up in the late 60's and during the 70's had something to do with it.  It was a fractured time.  One of my early memories is standing outside of our house in Van Buren, Arkansas on the warm pavement and hearing the word "impeached."  It was Nixon that my neighbor girl was talking about, but in my young mind I kept thinking how could they squeeze a president into a can of peaches? (Arkansas is a big peach producer, you know.) This is silly, of course, but I think one's early political memories are very influential.  I also remember the footage on tv of Vietnam--as I guess you did, too.  I had an uncle there as well.  Also, the rumors of boys who came back strung out on "that ol' dope," as my grandmother would say, were part of my early memory fabric.  Additionally, my parents were some of the first people that I knew to get a divorce and in the South where family is so important to one's identity, that was quite a hit.  I think I read, as so many writers have done, as an escape, but also as a way to find out things that no one seemed to want to tell me.  I always had the sense-- and largely from my Southern Baptist upbringing-- that there were things you shouldn't talk about.  I wanted to talk about them and writing seemed a somewhat acceptable way to do this.

10) You are in the process of shopping a book what is your process for that?

By hook or by crook!  No...I like to research presses as a way to figure out if my work will fit with them.  Sometimes the writing seems to be the easiest part and the marketing strategies the hardest.  Honestly-- and despite my gregariousness as a person-- I have a difficult time promoting myself.  I guess its the "modesty as virtue" that I grew up with.  I think I'm slowly shedding that.  At least I hope so.

Craft Questions

1) How do you write a poem?

It varies.  Sometimes it's influenced by something I've heard, something I've seen....  A lot of times it begins in my reading or in a conversation I've had with someone.  A lot of my poems have friends' names in them or people speaking and so, quite obviously, the poem has been triggered for me through those encounters.

2) Is poetry a synthetic or organic process for you?

Both.  I was just working on a poem that was inspired by my stay in Costa Rica last summer.  I had gone to Tortuguero which is on the Caribbean Sea where a large number of sea turtles go to lay their eggs each year.  It was pretty amazing being there with this turtle digging her nest behind me and the Milky Way that was so bright it was almost frightening in front of me.  I was thinking of how our behaviour is so hard-wired in many ways--hence, the poem.  But then I went back and began to read about sea turtles which, of course, changed the poem a lot.  I like what Richard Hugo said in Triggering Town...something to the effect of "there's always something better."

3) Where do you write? Is ambience important for you?

I mostly write at my desk here at 9 Einhorn Road.  I love thinking that I'm writing on a street that is called "unicorn" in German and named for a physician that helped cure the stomach ailments of one of Worcester's founders!  I write with a lot of books around me and pictures and quirky things like bottle caps, postcards, stones or shells I've picked up in my travels.  I have a piece of cullet from the Ozark Mountains that sits on one of my shelves.  It always reminds me of home in all of its kitsch and refuse and brightness.  I also carry around a black notebook and write down things I see, hear, read as I go through the world.  It's fun and helps immensely for poem food.

4) In the space between created language and found language where do you fall?

 I would say somewhere in the middle, but if I had to choose it would likely be "found" language.  I always tell my students that a lot of my language has its genesis in Baptist hymns or the speech and story of home (as a way to get them to think about their own background languages.  I am reminded of this every time I read Charles Wright.  One foundational story that I think gets at this is about my paternal grandfather out working in the river bottoms around Lavaca, Arkansas (you've got to love a Southern town name that comes from the Spanish, "la vaca," the cow!)  A college recruiter came out to the field and said, "Son, how would you like to go to college and play football for us?"  My grandfather, who we called "Papaw," replied, "I don't know what college is, but anything beats the hell out of hoeing cotton."  I think lines like that are always behind what I do somehow.