Gretchen Marquette

An interview with Richard Jarrette

In December of 2010, I was finishing up a graduate course on Ode and Elegy. On one of the last nights, my professor came to class very excited about a book called Beso the Donkey. If I remember right, he called it a miracle, and recommended we check it out. I sent away for it, and it arrived the day after Christmas. The collection of poems was, on one level, the story of an abandoned, mistreated donkey. On another, it provided incredible insights about acceptance, suffering and love. It was a miracle of a book — so much so that I wrote to Richard Jarrette and told him so. I found him to be an affable guy and a great admirer and advocate for poetry in general. I met up with him this year in Chicago at AWP and asked him a few questions about Beso, the writing life, and what we can look forward to next.

Gretchen Marquette (SLEET): Did you conceive of Beso as a book from the beginning, or did it slowly evolve into a book length project? Do you remember how the project began?

Richard Jarrette (RJ): It was time to meet my sweetheart Ekaterina's father. As he sat down to dinner he said, On the way here I saw a donkey alone in a field and it made me very sad because they are very intelligent and social beings. I think it was the word “beings” that captured. I wrote the title poem that night, “Beso The Donkey.” Two more came. At our scheduled monthly meeting, my screenwriting mentor, Gerald Dipego, read the latest draft of my movie and the three donkey poems. He said, I think you should do this. By the fifth poem, I was seized. Rilke says in his poem, “The Walk:” So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp…and changes us, even if we do not reach it….

I thought I had lost my mind, some agreed. I kept at it, the writing was oddly nurturing, fed something. I felt that I was healing from an unknown disease. In response to a friend's query about what I was writing, I said, it was something about a wounded, neglected and abandoned jackass. Ah, he replied, an autobiography. Some fine writers closely read the poems and began calling them “Besos,” as in, That's a Beso, that one is not a Beso. I didn't get it most of the time. I once sent twelve to Jerry, he said, Now that's some good Beso. I was in strange waters. I did know from the start that the titles should have “Beso” in them, because they were more about him than me.

A friend once told me about finding a dying dolphin on the beach and how she lay down beside it, singing, stroking it. I was horrified by the presumption of a person thinking that their human voice, or scraping hand, would comfort a dolphin. I wrote “Beside Beso”: “My hand on his back, a boil of flies tasting rigging scars.” I wanted to honor him, pay attention, without sentiment, to who he was, to listen. And I wanted to document my failure to understand and failure to heal him. He was a real abandoned and neglected jackass, there he was, but he was also everywhere, and got inside of me — was perhaps already there.

SLEET: How did you ultimately shape the book? And what was the process of getting it published? If I remember correctly, it's a pretty extraordinary story.

RJ: I spent nearly three years writing and editing 150 “Besos,” cut them back to 85, then to 71. I was ruthless (with utterly strong editor Dan Gerber, who was always telling me to “stop chasing my tail”). About a year after I was done, it dawned on me that the book might also (in addition to whatever else it is) be a reply to, or dialogue with, W.S. Merwin's poem, “Little Horse.” I stumbled on that poem in 1969, reading his book Animae, and I felt that I would never be the same (with no clue what that meant). When I encountered Beso thirty-five years later, the poems simply started arriving.

I don't know how I knew when I was finished, but I did somehow. I sent the manuscript to Ekaterina in Nigeria (we had parted, she joined Médicins Sans Frontières) and another copy to W.S. Merwin care of his publisher. He wrote back saying, My wife and I love these poems, you are at liberty to send them to my publisher, Michael Wiegers at Copper Canyon, at my suggestion. I nearly fainted in the post office.

Other poets I had long admired provided more positive reviews. I was stunned, rather confused. Mr. Wiegers couldn't get to it, though he wrote a lovely letter. Michigan State University Press accepted it very quickly. None of the poems were submitted to journals. It all went to the publisher pre-blurbed by Merwin, Stroud and Hirshfield, all of a piece. Beso is now being translated into Chinese by Professor Yun Wang, MSU expressed excitement. No one is more surprised than me. I still do not feel an “ownership” of the book—it's Beso's.

I owe a debt of gratitude of transcendental proportions to Dan Gerber for his attention to the poems. I truly cannot say what the book is about nor where it came from. It arrived, I met the train. Beso is still “just beyond my grasp.” I began the book early 2007, it was accepted for publication October 2009, released November 2010. Whatever it is, it is certainly a love letter to Beso, and to Ekaterina Anna Oxuna Galiyeva, RN wherever she is in the war zones.

SLEET: You begin Beso with an epigraph, “Unto all mortals let there be equal grace.” The lives of animals seem to appear pretty regularly in your poems and you seem concerned with giving them respect and attention. How do nonhuman relationships inform your life and work?

RJ: The epigraph is from a Noh play translated by Ezra Pound. I have simply never felt separate from other beings. I certainly fear sharks, snakes, horses, hateful dogmatic humans of any stripe, but ultimately always felt a general intimacy with all of creation. This might be my father's doing whose ramblings in his childhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina were so vital to his survival and which he pulled me into. He shocked me on more than one occasion with his tenderness to all creatures despite eruptions of brutality toward me from time to time. I was once burning ants with a magnifying glass, he stopped me with a moral lecture about their legitimate role in the world and left me to ponder, did not take the glass from me.

We are all in the soup together, destroy one and the next is going to fall, and the next, all of us. You might say I am a radical ecologist which to me means a practical person. My poems begin with a bird, a spider, a tree, light moving through meadow grass, chirr of grasshoppers, the sound of wild pigs and how cows and calves do not lift their heads to the grunts of those pigs rooting for acorns under the oaks, which scare the shit out of me. A bird once shot past my window frame so fast my eyes had no time to track it. It came to me; there is much beyond the window frame I know nothing about.

I describe myself as a Zen Buddhist, and although I have over forty years of reading and thought in that area, my study has not been disciplined with a teacher, nor monastic. I have been lazy in my study and discipline, except for Tai Chi Chuan. Birds and cats in my neighborhood seem to like to watch the movements. Cats often leave a gift of a gopher nearby my practice area. I think crows have intentionally dropped walnuts on me. But what do I know? Finding my father dead at home when I was thirteen informed me about death:  “I attend to Beso / a donkey who will die / but asks so little of me…” We are mortal, I long for grace along with every living creature. A bug is brother/sister, the wind. All creatures and elements are in constant interaction and dialogue and I feel less alone being part of the conversation. Merwin wrote, Men think they are better than grasses. True, and this puzzles me.

SLEET: If you could put a book of poetry on every bookshelf in the country (assuming it would be read,) which book would it be?

RJ:  Oh, having to pick one, I think Mr. Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius is invaluable—filled with the intimacy with things, people, memory, light, the sound of water, the sound of water being the sound of the bridge “being there,” the “Letter to Sung Po,” his homage to his dogs, “Nomad Flute,” the opening poem:  “I have with me all that I do not know I have lost none of it.” This line strikes me as containing the essence of all of his poems somehow—how he succeeds, nearly succeeds, ponders the failure of not succeeding in grasping the “I don't know.” His line from “The Lice,” “the gods are what has failed to become of us,” haunts me.

If one poem could be read by everyone in today's climate, I would choose Mr. Merwin's “The Fence for Matthew Shepard “ from The Pupil (2001). He describes the murder of Matthew Shepard by boys who tied him to a fence and beat him, leaving him to die. This poem is about demonization of “the other,” how we think we have to kill it—boy, wolf, coyote, hawk, Iraqi. All of my work that reaches for “the other” as brother or sister is the child of Mr. Merwin's work—all of it.

I read poems that make me want to write the instant the words hit my eyes. I don't have time for anything else: Mr. Merwin, Anne Carson, Tomas Tranströmer, Dan Gerber, Jane Hirshfield, Ellen Dore Watson, Rilke, David Ferry…

SLEET: Are you a person who memorizes poems? If so, why do you think it's important to hold on to poems this way? What purpose does it serve for you?

RJ:  Yes, a memorized poem becomes a presence, a companion, opening to many levels of meaning and experience the more I live with it. I once memorized nearly all of Shakespeare's sonnets when I had to spend a lot of time in a car. They are amazing little bouillon cubes of intense theater, as if the curtain is suddenly thrown back and you are right there in the middle of it!

I also memorize my own poems, to edit. Thus, I can work publicly at a bar, gazing at olives in a martini glass (baby dragon eyeballs). Memorizing and sounding my poems is important to determine if I believe them. I think Mr. Gerber said it best to me once, Richard, your problem is you write poems, you need to make yourself a place for them to arrive. Well, once they do, I need to hear them to find out if they indeed have arrived, I reckon, which is simply a personal thing without judgment of others.

I once memorized most of Joe Stroud's “I Wanted to Paint Paradise.” I needed it, and many others. It seems respectful to memorize another poet's words, loving, and so deeply pleasurable. Zen Master Yunmen once said, “When I open my mouth to talk a goat lifts its tail, turds drop on the ground. Bah.” Good poems are not turds, they are delicious. Memorization forces me to find meanings, story, and the poem's breath — which can be revelatory, as with the earlier Shakespeare versions.

SLEET: You give many readings. What has your experience been, bringing Beso “to the stage,” so to speak?

RJ:  I have memorized Beso the Donkey and can deliver it without notes. But this becomes “performance” which leaves an impression more of the “actor” than the words and I have become shy of this after experimentation. I have been filmed on four or five occasions “performing” Beso. If I were skilled enough, perhaps I could say the poems without “performance” beyond clear story telling in a plain and present way. I think it also worries the audience if I launch into the whole of Beso without notes—they begin wondering if I can pull it off and their minds slip away to me, rather than staying with Beso.

It seems best that the poet upholds the words, not the other way around. I've been called out for inflating myself with my poems, deeply embarrassing. Dan Gerber and Barry Spacks weighed in on this for which I am profoundly grateful. Since then, I have listened to “performance poets” and have walked out on more than one occasion because I can't attend to even one word that they are delivering–a balloon dangerously enlarging on the stage.

I read in an interview that Jane Hirshfield doesn't hear her poems until the first public reading. I was astounded. I said to her, That's either incredibly disciplined, or very loopy. She looked at me, kindly, and said, Well, neither, I think. To me, it's about allowing in, receiving, not going out. We find this so often in her poems, wonderfully in the last poem of Come, Thief —her envy, not of the stag pouring through a fence, but “To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me..” In this regard, she is living as I think David Hinton describes the “Dark Enigma” poets—standing on the threshold of “Dark Enigma” as it blows through you.

SLEET: Can you tell us about your next book?

RJ: It was thrilling to be seized by Beso for three years! But I have a few hundred other poems that I have culled to around ninety or so. Some of these will survive a final edit. A few have been published here and there. These were written before, during, and after Beso and have all been read during composition by poets I trust. I was shocked to finally pile up the poems written alongside the “Besos,” there were more of them. It seemed as if my right hand was captured by Beso while my left was attending quietly.

I am more patient than I once was, more respectful of the poem that seems to want to be, as opposed to my need to be a poet and write poems. Of course, having a well-received book in print is quite calming! That said, I guess the next collection is all over the place: North Carolina as a child, what there is to say to a trophy ear brought home by a soldier I knew who had been in Vietnam, surviving a lightning strike  There is a series of what I call “bench” poems:  sit on a bench, don't do anything, don't try to do anything, don't pay attention to anything, don't write a poem, but if a poem occurs so be it. I'm blazing through that series with about four or five of them in two years. There are some odes: to white yarrow, a sparrow, to satisfaction, to the Great Enigma, a daddy longlegs, to the word “soul.” My father once took me on a hunt when I was five for a spring he first drank from as a boy. We drank the water on our knees in a briar thicket, we crawled out of our “wild church” when it was dark, and made our way. So there are poems about wild innocence, the earth, how a winter birch looks like my great-grandmother. I'm beginning to see a thread…

Richard Jarrette was kind enough to loan us three new poems, which you can find on our poetry page. For more information on Jarrette and his work, please visit http://msupress.msu.edu/bookTemplate.php?bookID=4054.