Writer Mother Monster: Rosanna Warren, “The book that I started in 1985 just came out in 2020, if that gives anybody courage to keep on going.”

(March 11, 2021) Rosanna Warren has been publishing “poems of riveting, compassionate darkness and social conscience for nearly 40 years” (LA Review of Books) and is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and many others. She describes writer-motherhood in 3 words as: “frazzled, passionate, surprised.” In this episode, Rosanna talks about writing lines like knife stabs, growing up as the daughter of famous authors, putting poems in a compost heap, and why her girlhood was like Halloween.

Writer Mother Monster is a conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of "having it all" and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice as we make space for creative endeavors.

Transcript

Writer Mother Monster: Rosanna Warren

March 11, 2021

Rosanna Warren has been publishing “poems of riveting, compassionate darkness and social conscience for nearly 40 years” (LA Review of Books). Her most recent book of poems is So Forth (2020). She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the New England Poetry Club, among others, and she was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She teaches at the University of Chicago. Rosanna has two daughters, ages 37 and 35, and two grandchildren, a boy and a girl, ages 6 and 3. She describes writer-motherhood in three words as “frazzled, passionate, surprised.”

Lara Ehrlich

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is Rosanna Warren. Before I introduce Rosanna, thank you all for tuning in. You can now listen to Writer Mother Monster as a podcast on all major audio platforms or read the interview transcript on writermothermonster.com. If you enjoyed the episode, as always, please consider becoming a patron or patroness on Patreon to help make this series possible. Please also chat with Rosanna and me during the interview. Your comments and questions will appear in our broadcast studio, and we’ll weave them into the conversation. And now I’m excited to introduce Rosanna. 

Rosanna Warren has been publishing “poems of riveting, compassionate darkness and social conscience for nearly 40 years” (LA Review of Books). Her most recent book of poems is So Forth (2020). She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the New England Poetry Club, among others, and she was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She teaches at the University of Chicago and taught at Boston University, where I first met Rosanna in a class called Eccentric Moderns, which we’ll talk about. It is not hyperbole to say that Rosanna was one of the best professors I ever had. And I’m not saying that just because she agreed to come on the show with me today. She also has two daughters, ages 37 and 35, and two grandchildren, a boy and a girl, ages 6 and 3. She describes writer-motherhood in three words as “frazzled, passionate, surprised.”

Rosanna Warren  

Thank you, Lara, so much. It is really lovely to rediscover you so many years after we were reading Hart Crane together.

Lara Ehrlich
 Thank you so much for coming on with me today. I was telling you before the show that there were many others who were in classes with you at BU and elsewhere, of course, who are very excited to that you’ll be on the show with me tonight, so hello to all of you as well, BU friends, excited to have you and please comment and chat with us in the comments tonight. So, Rosanna, I’d love for you to read the poem that you came prepared to share with us, if you’re ready. 

Rosanna Warren
 I have it here at my fingertips. This is a poem to one of my daughters, so it seemed like an appropriate offering for this evening. This daughter, whose name is Chiara, is a psychiatric social worker, and she works with very, very needy people.

For Chiara 

Leaves crackle beneath our feet—tinder, kindling—
 as we walk by the brook, the crab-apple tree
 a crimson pointilliste nimbus.
 You want to hold each wounded soul in your hands.
 Autumn flares. The damaged, the human berserk,
 find their way to you. I don’t know how you sleep.
 In the Gorgon’s blood, one drop is poison, the other heals.
 Fevered autumn, autumn I adore
 croons an old song. We stroll the road
 scuffing dust. And come upon
 a garter snake lying motionless,
 its tail, we guess, nicked by a passing car.
 When we nudge it, it flips to its back in an agonized S,
 squirms, but can’t advance. Its belly gleams.
 We edge it into the grass. Do we stop seeing
 when we walk away? The brook prattles on.
 Home’s far off. Dusk settles, slowly, among leaves.
 That’s not mercy, scattering from its hands.

Lara Ehrlich  

Thank you. That was just as powerful as I remember your poetry and your presence as being, so thank you. And tell us a little bit more. Let’s start with that poem. Tell me a bit more about it, and why it is dedicated to your daughter, titled after your daughter.

Rosanna Warren 

This poem became very important to me for the two half lines, “Do we stop seeing / when we walk away?” It just seems to me a fundamental ethical question in life, about how we acknowledge the suffering of others, whether we can acknowledge the suffering of others, and to what extent, to preserve ourselves. Maybe we just walk away, don’t want to see. I can’t speak for other people. I know that for myself, there are times when I say the story’s unbearable, I can’t read this article anymore, I can’t solve everybody’s hunger in the world. And yet, there’s the impulse that we should care for each other. My daughter who works with severely suffering people does a kind of job I could not do, to have the stress level of trying to manage caring for people who are desperately needy, and day in day out. Somehow people who do that kind of therapy and caring must develop, I think, a really extraordinary spiritual strength and psychological strength to be able to hold that suffering and continue their lives and try to help people. But I guess we all, in some way, figure out our own balance and our own way to try to acknowledge the suffering, or at least acknowledge that we’re not acknowledging it.

Lara Ehrlich  

I wish that before this interview I had revisited the notes from the class I took with you. I still have them all somewhere in the house. You’re bringing back memories of that class, because we talked about this type of issue. Yes, we looked at lines within poems, we looked at words, but we also talked about these big, philosophical concerns of humanity and the poet’s responsibility to address them. That’s something I really took away from your class. Can you talk about those two lines in the context of poetry and the importance of poetry, and the lines that you repeated: “Do we stop seeing when we walk away?”

Rosanna Warren 

Well, this poem is, in a way, pretty simple. It’s an anecdote of a mother, or I guess we don’t know it’s a mother in the poem — it’s an “I” speaking to a “you” — taking a walk, finding a wounded snake, and in a sense, not doing the merciful thing. I think if I’d been courageous, I would have probably killed this snake, put it out of its misery, and I just couldn’t do it. It was cowardice. I just couldn’t, so we just got it off the road, which was the cowardly thing to do, though I’m not a vet. Maybe a vet could have saved it. But you know, we were in the wilds of Vermont and there was no better route. Anyway, it is a morally troubling scene, and painful, just painful, to see another creature’s pain and to feel implicated. 

I try not to write poems that explain themselves too much. I try to have the poem be suggestive, to have the objects and actions and colors in the poem do the work for the imagination, but in this case, I allowed myself to be extremely, brutally direct: “Do we stop seeing when we walk away?” — and I’m okay with that, of allowing poems to sometimes speak very directly, if it’s not too crude. 

I hoped the scene around it would make it complex enough. I think I would like poems to be unsettling in different ways, and for occasionally a line to feel like a knife stab.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, and grapple with these big concerns about morality and violence and our moral imperative.

Rosanna Warren 

I chose this poem when you invited me to be on this fascinating podcast because it’s something that any anybody who’s a parent has lived. Motherhood seems to be so profoundly about caring, and a deep lesson in caring.

Lara Ehrlich  

Let’s talk more about that. I was going to ask you if your daughter had read this poem. 

Rosanna Warren 

Yes.

Lara Ehrlich

Does she recall that moment? Or what does she have to say about this poem?

Rosanna Warren 

I think she thought that it wasn’t an invasion of her privacy. I try to be really careful with my friends and family members about my poetry. Some poets take a few more liberties than I do with other people’s private lives. I tried to set some boundaries. I know my children would like me to set some boundaries. But she seemed to have forgiven me for this poem, or I don’t think she thought I really needed forgiveness for this poem. I wouldn’t think so. But I’m sure we both cared about the snake, were both upset by the snake.

Lara Ehrlich  

Absolutely. Let’s shift to motherhood for a second and talk about your children. You have two girls, both in their mid-30s now, and two grandkids. But let’s back way up, even before I knew you at BU and your kids at that time were teenagers—which is horrifying to me, that that was 20 years ago—and tell me a little bit about new motherhood. Did you always want to have children?

Rosanna Warren 

That really interesting. No, I didn’t. When I was a young person, from childhood through my adolescence, I wanted to be a painter. I saw myself as an artist. I worked really hard at it. I was drawing from the age of 3. I went to art schools. I was also writing, but that was private. I didn’t see myself in a conventional family at all. I also was uncomfortable with the role of being a, quote, “girl” in high school. It was unbearable. Those awful dances. I just thought the whole thing was so awful.

Lara Ehrlich  

I’m with you there. Yeah. It’s truly terrible.

Rosanna Warren 

And then you bumble your way into adulthood, and you fall in love with a few people, and you sort of try to get the hang of it. This romance stuff, when I was a teenager, struck me like a Halloween party—you had to play “girl” and put on some makeup, and thank God that’s over. But then, falling in love with somebody enough so that you could imagine having a life together, and then children emerged from that, and that just seemed so natural and beautiful. I never resented it. I just thought it was this tremendous gift—and maybe all the more tremendous because I hadn’t imagined it for myself.

Lara Ehrlich  

I understand. I didn’t either. And then, like you, it was meeting a person and then suddenly it was like, well, that just makes sense that I would want to have a family with this person. But without the person, it was just me kind of envisioning my own trajectory solo. Let’s go back to your early life because I know that you grew up in a very artistic, literary family. How did that shape you and your expectations for yourself as a writer?

Rosanna Warren 

I suppose it was a piece of luck, and in some ways, not luck, to grow up in a family of writers. My mother and father were both well-known writers [Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark], so in a way, that was great that I had a model of living that way. They were very disciplined. The study doors shut at nine in the morning. They didn’t open the doors until two in the afternoon. My brother and I were often in remote places in the country during the summer. We just knew that unless we had broken our leg, we were not allowed to bother our parents, so we had to figure out our own games and wander around play, which we did. 

We grew up in a world where practicing an art was considered natural and not goofy. The difficulty of it wasn’t that our parents thought we should be artists—in fact, they sort of advised us against it—but when my brother became a sculptor, and I started writing more than I was painting in my early 20s, I had to deal with the social expectations of outsiders looking at me and thinking, “She’s just riding on her parents’ reputation.” In order to be a writer, in order to have the courage to go on and keep writing and publishing, I just had to ignore all that and follow the drive that I had to make these things in words. It was such a strong inner drive. I really wanted to be a painter, I tried to suppress the words, I just couldn’t.

Lara Ehrlich  

Tell me about that. What was the drive to paint and why suppress the urge or the desire to write?

Rosanna Warren 

I can’t explain the drive to paint, but from the age of 3, I was drawing. And I was good at it, I think I can modestly say. I drew and painted all through my childhood and was encouraged. Also, I was born in 1953, so television existed, but my family didn’t own a television. We lived a weird, almost 19th-century life without television. When I went to school, I didn’t understand what the other kids were talking about, because they were talking about TV shows I’d never seen. I was painting and drawing and writing and playing games with my brother. I can’t tell you where the drawing came from, but it was so deeply part of what I was doing. 

Then, when I went to Yale, it was a very fine art school, and I had marvelous painting teachers. Then I went to Skowhegan, which is a wonderful summer program for ambitious young artists, and the New York Studio School, so that was how I saw my life, and I was absolutely passionate about it. But the writing really did keep clawing at me, and there were things I couldn’t get into the paintings, things like saying, “Do we stop seeing when we walk away?” I couldn’t get that into a painting. That drama. So gradually, the writing took over the painting. It took me a few years. It was like a love affair, gradually dwindling and painful. When I was about 24, I realized I wasn’t painting enough to be a painter. That was painful. I still draw. I draw privately. I draw because it’s a way of orienting myself in reality, and it’s just a form of meditation. It’s not to show people.

Lara Ehrlich  

I love that, and I think others have that feeling about writing, right? Like writing in journals and so on for self-expression, with no urge to show others, which I don’t understand. Even when I’m writing in a journal, I’m thinking, someday someone will read this as part of my archives. I never quite have this sense that I’m writing for myself. I wonder what that would be like. I love the idea of drawing for yourself. 

I have a comment here from Nichole Gleisner, who you probably remember, and she goes back to your parents shutting their office doors and says, “I’ve heard this described as benign neglect, and I think it can be really freeing for parent artists to cultivate this freedom.” I definitely agree, and it’s something I’ve heard a lot of the writer mothers talk about on the show. Some are very comfortable closing the door, and others are struggling with the guilt involved in closing the door to their children. And it sounds like you and your brother were able to play and to find some freedom there, but was there also any resentment on the part of you and your brother toward your parents for closing the door? And how did that carry through to your practice?

Rosanna Warren 

Oh, that’s interesting. I don’t remember feeling any resentment myself as a child with my parents closing the door. It was just understood that was the way things were. They were very loving when they when they were with us. They were really with us, playing games, including us. But I know my own children missed me at times, and it was hard for them and hard for me, especially when they were little. My daughters have told me, “Mom, when you shut the door, I was crying on the other side.” I didn’t stay in the study with a little child weeping on the other side of the door, but there were tensions, which I think is partly why you have this show. This is not easy, being a mother and any kind of artist or professional person. There are costs.

Lara Ehrlich  

What was your logistical practice when you had young kids? Were you able to close the door, if they weren’t weeping on the other side? How did you balance your kids and the time that you needed for devoted work?

Rosanna Warren 

I think balance might be an overstatement. I remember it more as a kind of delirium or something. I was teaching full-time and staying up very late, one or two in the morning, correcting papers or preparing class, and then getting up at six to try to walk the dog and get those children off to school. Where do you write? 

I have such intense memories that maybe the mothers watching this show, perhaps the fathers, too, will have some version of this. For instance, one of the places I could try to write a poem was when I was doing the laundry. I take a big basket of laundry down to the cellar, leaving the children upstairs and their father and the dog or whatever, and I could have 10 minutes, say, in the basement, sitting on the floor with my back to the washing machine, with my little pad, and the washing machine still going behind me, scribbling in the pad. I just remember those were my laundry days. Or driving to BU and parking in the parking lot, and before rushing in to teach, giving myself 10 minutes in the car, resting the pad on the steering wheel. I have these memories so intensely, because there were times when that was all I could get.

Lara Ehrlich  

Thank you for sharing that. I feel like particularly when we talk to writers who are very successful and have a lot of work that they can show for their career, it’s hard to remember that that work wasn’t written all at once or even at a desk. I think there’s that perception of sitting at a desk behind a closed door, working from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. or whatever it is, and so many women I’ve spoken to have said, much like you did, that they write or did write when their kids were younger in the laundry room or in the car or while on walk, those carved-out spaces. You clearly got a lot accomplished in those carved-out spaces, but maybe not all at one time. You didn’t certainly write an entire book in the laundry room during one sitting.

Rosanna Warren 

No. But I also was lucky in that I got some leaves from Boston University. I’m very grateful to Boston University for so many reasons. For one thing, they took a chance on me when I was young, and I don’t have a Ph.D. They really took a chance on this young whippersnapper, would-be writer, and gave me a chance to see if I could teach and be useful. And I tried to be useful. But also write books. I was grateful to BU for giving me leaves, and I’m very grateful I got some grants. You mentioned the Guggenheim, which was in the American Council of Learned Societies. Those were just absolutely blessed opportunities to buy me out for my teaching time for a year or a half year. 

The Guggenheim was 1985, and that, too, was life changing. I was trying to write a biography of the French poet Max Jacob. The book that I started in 1985 just came out in 2020, if that gives anybody courage to keep on going. I dragged a 6-month-old baby and a 2-year-old to Paris on a Guggenheim, which … it’s prestigious, but it’s not much money. I lived in a dark hole next to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and I had with me a very wonderful ex-BU student, who was sharing our difficulties on a tiny, little stipend and the chance to be in Paris. She took care of the kids for four hours a day, while I ran to the library or did interviews and rushed back so she could go off and do whatever she wanted in Paris. I think it’s insane, when I look back at what I did, dragging a baby and a toddler to Paris. We all survived. And the book came out in 2020, for God’s sake.

Lara Ehrlich  

It’s amazing. Congratulations. Heather Liz in the chat says, “I find children tend to accept absent fathers who are not around or shutting the door for their work. My own various-age children still hold a double standard for me and my writing versus my spouse.” Did you find that? Tell us a little bit about your spouse and what that working relationship was like.

Rosanna Warren 

Well, I should say, I am now divorced, but not because of that. We had a very good marriage for many, many years. My spouse was also a professor at Boston University in Classics. We were both harried, exhausted, passionate teachers, writers, scholars, and I felt we were really in it together, supporting each other, so that was great. That was not a problem.

Lara Ehrlich  

I see Heather asking about children’s perspectives, when they’re old enough to voice them, about their mother’s or their father’s absences. Heather adds, “It’s infuriating to know that my shut door hurts more than all the hours my spouse is gone, engaged in work.” I wonder that about my own daughter. Will she weigh my absences more heavily than the time that my husband goes to his job? Without getting too much into your children’s personal lives, have you found that your children have given you feedback about the time that you spent away from them?

Rosanna Warren 

My elder daughter is now a mother of two young children, and she a very hard-working lawyer, and they’re experiencing same kind of stresses, she and her husband being professional people and having very young, needy children, especially during a pandemic year. This has been so awful especially for women and mothers dealing with children at home. We don’t have to quote all the New York Times articles we all know, but it’s been a dreadful year for families under super stress. I mean, you and I are talking now about normal stresses, which are hard enough. To go back to that wounded snake in my poem, I just hope in any family that there’s enough basic trust and enough basic structure of caring that the children would fundamentally feel that they’re loved. I think that’s the fundamental strength any person needs to get through life. I just have to trust that that’s going to sustain us through our difficulties.

Lara Ehrlich  

I think that’s a great point. It’s something I struggle with, personally, particularly during the pandemic, when my daughter hasn’t been in school for a year. My parents live 15 minutes away, so they’ve been watching her during the week, so I can do my day job and try to fit in the writing around the laundry, like you described. She is loved, and she feels no lack there, but there’s still the guilt of not being the one who is doing the loving during the majority of the day. I think that’s a very good point to bring up: as long as the child feels loved, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be by the mother actively all the time. It could be from others who love your child.

Rosanna Warren 

And that the mother’s time and the father’s time, when they’re there, is good time. Time that is really engaged. There are so many marvelous things to say about having children. One of my revelations about it was that you’re no longer the center of the world. That was an important lesson. I don’t know if I was egomaniacal before having a child, but having a child, you realize you are not the center of the world anymore. Your whole cosmology has changed. You got your fundamental imperatives to care for somebody else. That’s amazing, and that’s carried through the whole rest of my life as this profound lesson. 

The other thing that I feel, among many things, from having children, is the mystery of personhood. It’s an extraordinary miracle that a creature has come into the world who has grown to be a person, and you couldn’t have predicted anything about this person. It’s like watching a seed turn into a little sprout and then grow leaves and grow up into the sun. It’s astonishing. I do feel it is miraculous. I’m in awe. The whole rest of our lives, I think of us as struggling to become people. I think it’s probably not ended until we’re in our graves. But you really see it in a baby and then a young child.

Lara Ehrlich  

How did that work its way into your work, watching a person unfold?

Rosanna Warren 

Oh, I’m not sure I could even say, because it happens at so many levels. It’s not something I’ve ever addressed explicitly in poems, but maybe it’s a sensibility of that feeling of approaching life with awe—as much as watching a bear. We’re way off in the woods here. I’ve been in COVID-19 retreat in a cabin in the Catskills for an entire year, and we have black bears around here, so watching the bears this summer and fall—I watched them, too. They’re not people, but they’re creatures with very strong imperatives to live their own lives. I watch them with as much awe as I watch my fellow human beings.

Lara Ehrlich  

How did the realization that you weren’t at the center of the world—and that the center of your world shifted to keeping this other person alive—develop and grow? How did that change your work?

Rosanna Warren 

Well, again, I’m not sure how to answer that. Maybe it has to do with noticing what is in your field of vision, what are you caring about, what are you seeing, what’s the poem’s crisis or trouble? Because I never intended to write poems or be a writer, the poems have to have an urgency. They have a demand, a problem to solve, and some kind of trouble is the germ of a poem for me. The trouble is often not about me, the writer, so much as something outside me in in the world in relation to the consciousness that is perceiving. I’m getting a little abstract here.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s okay!

Rosanna Warren 

But not being the center of the world is a problem in vision. It’s almost a problem in optics. Where are you standing? Who’s perceiving what? What is the material of the poem? What is going to give it the urgency? What is going to give it the trouble?

Lara Ehrlich  

This is probably a mean question, but is there a poem that you wrote, before you became a mother, that if you were to rewrite it, or to write it now as a mother, that the optics would shift? Could you give us an example?

Rosanna Warren 

Wow, that is hard. Because it’s a long time ago. Hard to say. But I guess some of the poems of romantic distress or erotic distress of young womanhood, where the wounded self is at the heart of things, the wounded angry self, the vengeful self, that whatever those poems are, it’s not that they’re less interesting to me, they have their own kind of energy. I think I honor that energy, that young woman energy, of erotic drama. Partly, it’s just getting older but also getting older and having children and grandchildren and a different experience of life, as one even inevitably does getting older, but that’s no longer the drama that interests me now, to write about myself. I’m interested in reading those poems written by whoever’s writing them.

Lara Ehrlich  

I’m interested how that ties back to you as a young woman in high school hating those dances and resisting sort of that idea of girlhood. I connect with you so much there. I resisted that girlhood so much that at times I tried to have some of my male friends call me by a boy’s name so that they would accept me as one of their group rather than perceive me as a girl with all the weaknesses I perceived as coming along with that. Tell me about 13-year-old Rosanna Warren. What were you like at that age?

Rosanna Warren 

Oh, probably insufferable. Reading Dostoevsky and drawing all day and being shy and getting along better with my dog than with kids my age. I’m looking at a poem here that I published a few years ago called “A Way.” It was originally published in Poetry Magazine, and now it’s in my book So Forth. I’ll just read a few lines. It has a scene from when I was in my very early 20s, probably still in college, a summer in Paris in a painting program, and meeting some guy on the street. It’s about this Halloween drama of gender roles. I won’t read the whole poem. It has an epigraph from a pop singer, Marianne Faithfull, whose early incarnation was singing in a very sweet, little girl voice. Then, when she had a period of terrible drug addiction and living on the street, her voice got rough and kind of really interesting. Anyway, “A Way”:

The whole trick of this thing ... is to get out of your own light.
                       — Marianne Faithfull

She said she sang very close to the mike

to change the space. And I changed the space

by striding down the Boulevard Raspail at dusk in tight jeans

until an Algerian engineer plucked the pen from my back pocket.

As if you’re inside my head and you’re hearing the song from in there.

He came from the desert, I came

from green suburbs. We understood

nothing of one another over glasses of metallic red wine.

I was playing Girl. He played

Man. Several plots were afoot, all

misfiring.

That’s the beginning of the poem. It’s an oblique way of responding to your question. But I guess, every one of us, whatever gender we are or want to be or find our way to, I imagine as humans, we’re fumbling to become whole people, the kind of wholeness that we imagined for ourselves. And we’re trying to find circumstances in which we’re allowed to do that. I feel it’s kind of an extraordinary time now, where in some cultures and societies there is more freedom to experiment with those roles and find ways to be comfortable in one’s body. There weren’t those freedoms, for instance, for the most part, in the 1950s when I was born.

Lara Ehrlich  

You talked a little bit about how poetry might be a place to play with or try on some of those different roles in exploration of yourself.

Rosanna Warren 

Yes, exactly. It’s a theater of possibilities. It is where we experiment with consciousness and where we can take all kinds of imaginative and emotional risks, because finally, as I often say, you’re doing it in the privacy of your study. You’re not hurting anybody, at least until you publish. Maybe that’s, in a larger sense, why we need art. It is the symbolic realm. Think of Greek tragedy. It’s the realm where the Athenians could gather for four days in a year and play out their worst nightmares. And in their comedies, play out their hysterical, obscene desires, and wit and humor—those tensions that might otherwise blow up a society.

Lara Ehrlich  

That’s amazing. Let’s talk about what happens to your poetry or to that playfulness once it moves from your own office to a book that someone else is holding.

Rosanna Warren 

Well, you don’t control it anymore, right? It’s out of your hands, and it becomes impersonal, however personal it felt when you crafted it. It becomes an object when it’s exteriorized. I don’t know what else to say, except that I am fascinated by the way the personal is metamorphosed. It’s almost an alchemy into something that becomes an art object. However, whatever fiction of personality is in the artwork, it is outside yourself. Now, of course, with all the social media, all these ways that people can publish their images and their writing, where we’re, in a sense, in a culture that’s increasingly saturated with expressiveness, it’s kind of glorious, the forms that expressiveness takes.

Lara Ehrlich  

I love that. Nichole has a question for you: Have you found the pandemic changing the form of your poetry at all? Nichole is finding that she’s gravitating to small, compact forums.

Rosanna Warren 

I’ve been writing a lot in this retreat up in the mountains this year. We came here March 14, 2020, escaping, having no idea that we’d be here a year later, like so many people. And I found that more than the pandemic, it was the politics of this year that so terrified me. I had a strange bifocal vision of being peacefully in our cabin and seeing no other human being, except for once a month going out to get groceries and basically living on beans and rice and tinned fish. We were being really super careful. 

And the outside world politically, feeling that our democracy was under severe threat in ways I could not have imagined. It just shows how naive I was. I could not have imagined earlier in my life that we would have this kind of threat, of a militant oligarchical revolution and takeover destruction of our democracy and suppression of the vote, so that affected my writing. It certainly did. I was trying to find ways to figure out how to put that horror, that fear, that anger into the shapes that would be honorable poems. And each new poem is a new struggle. It’s certainly put on enormous pressure. Besides doing the modest political activism that you can do if you’re an older person in retreat, which is writing a lot of postcards and doing “support the vote” efforts around the country. 

Anyway, so the pandemic was bad enough with the politics for me. What continued to be terrifying, I have to say, is what has been revealed about our country and its divisions and the fragility of our institutions. I’ve now got up on a soapbox, and I’m sorry. But it does affect artists in different ways. How can it not affect our vision? And our forms?

Lara Ehrlich  

Have you seen any patterns in the forms that your poems have taken in the last year? Have they gotten shorter or are on a soapbox and they feel bigger? What’s the scope of the poetry you’ve been writing for the last year?

Rosanna Warren 

Well, I don’t want to be on a soapbox. Not a good place for a poem to be. So that’s part of the discipline. That’s part of the aesthetic challenge, to put political anger and angst into a poem and yet still have it be a poem that works as a poem. They haven’t gotten longer or shorter, but they’ve gotten urgent in a certain way. There’s one that’s coming out shortly on the website Poem-a-Day called “Boletus,” which is the name of a mushroom. And you think it would be a poem about mushrooms, but it’s a poem about being poisoned and violence seen through nature. The way I work is to try to get at questions obliquely, because for one thing, I would like my poems to be meaningful in 25 or 50 years, not just 2021.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, definitely. Which actually leads to another question from our listeners: How do you know when a poem is finished?

Rosanna Warren 

That’s an eternal question. I think the French poet Paul Valéry said a poem is never finished; you just give up. Well, that’s a really good, serious question. I don’t necessarily know. I stick my drafts into what I call a compost heap, and I let them sit there for a while, decomposing or stinking or doing what things do in a compost heap, and then look at it a few weeks later and see how it looks to me then. And then I stick it back in and then look again, and if after some of this compost heap process, it still seems to hold together, then I would send it out to a magazine and see if any editor wants it. They might not. Or they might. That’s great. 

Giving public readings is another kind of test. But it’s not, for me, a really good test, because you cannot exactly fake a reading. But you can give an emotional, dramatic performance of a poem, and it gives you the illusion that it might be a good poem. It could even give the audience the illusion. But then when in the cold light of day, looking at it on paper, you might say, well, that’s a cheap move, or that’s fake. I just takes a lot of self-criticism and vigilance, which is why I like the question.

Lara Ehrlich  

I love the compost metaphor. I also love the articulation of how performance can imbue work with a glimmer of something that it doesn’t inherently possess or that it doesn’t have yet. Can you talk a little bit more about poetry as spoken performance and poetry in the cold light of day, if you’re holding it on the page?

Rosanna Warren 

Well, both are really important to me. I do love performing poems, other people’s as well as my own. I like to think of poetry as originating in music and song. As you probably remember from our classes, I used to translate ancient Greek lyric poetry. These poets really matter. They were performers. There was no separation then, in the seventh and sixth century, before the Common Era, of musical performance, of singing and dance, occasionally accompanied by an instrument, a flute or a stringed instrument. By the time that performative convention gets lost, by the time you get to Roman poetry, which I also love, that’s more text-based but it remembers the lyrical Greek conventions, all of which is background. 

This is in my mind, because I’ve translated those Greek poets, I’ve translated the Latin poets. I have a lot of poems memorized—English poems and French poems—that I chant to myself. And so, when I give a poetry reading of my own work, I do really love the performance. I throw myself into it. I feel it’s good. If it’s working, I feel possessed, in a kind of trance-like state, even. But I’m also aware of the dangers. I am aware of the possibility of deluding myself. So, it’s just a matter of trying, as I say, to stay vigilant. And then the critical mind is also part of creating poetry.

Lara Ehrlich 

I never thought about the performative part taking over the non-performative part of poetry. That’s really interesting to hear.

Rosanna Warren 

Honor them both. And especially now, with the world of spoken word poetry and young people having this marvelous forum for memorizing and performing. This is terrific. It’s almost like bringing back Ancient Greece.

Lara Ehrlich  

That’s lovely. Social media has returned us to Ancient Greece. Let’s completely switch tacks for a second here and talk about grandkids. How is the experience of watching your grandchildren grow up different than raising your own children? What’s it like to be a grandmother?

Rosanna Warren 

Oh, it’s delicious. This year of the pandemic has been hard since I haven’t seen them in person since last July. We do Zoom games, but it’s not as satisfying. I think I’ll just repeat myself and just talk about the awe of seeing a person grow into a person. My granddaughter, Adelaide, who just turned 6, when she was about 3, I just remember, I was amazed. She was so small. I was going to visit and take her for a walk or something. It was summer, so I was wearing sandals, and she saw I had a band aid on one of my toes, and she got really worried. And she said, “Grandma Rosanna, you have a boo-boo on your toes. Does it hurt?” This tiny child was really concerned that somebody else might be hurt. And so, I had to say, “Oh, it’s okay. It doesn’t really hurt that badly.” I just give this as an example of the miracle of personhood and of the child already developing empathy and awareness that other people have lives and they have feelings, too.

Lara Ehrlich   

Absolutely. Have you learned anything from your grandchildren that surprised you? My own parents are remembering things that they’d forgotten about having very small children around.

Rosanna Warren 

It’s partly the inventiveness. One of the glories of being a grandparent for me is rereading all those books that I loved as a child. I loved reading with my children, when they were little, too. Winnie the Pooh and, you know, The Wind in the Willows, just rediscovering all these stories and having the children be just as absorbed in them as I was. We inhabit all these worlds together, but the children are also making up their own worlds and inventing games and characters. They can play by themselves—talking to themselves and making their toys talk and making a whole imaginative world without any grown-up interfering and saying, why don’t you do this or that? That just seems so precious and probably the beginning of where human culture starts, this freedom to imagine and to make shapes, to act out dramas.

Lara Ehrlich  

I really admire that in my daughter, because I have lost my ability to do that, as I think most adults do—your ability to just kind of be absorbed in your own play without worrying about any outcomes or productivity or anything like that. I find it invigorating but also challenging to sit quietly with her and play with blocks or Legos or something, because I’m always reminding myself that I have to be there in the moment with her and I shouldn’t be thinking about work or something else I should be doing. I find that my parents have a lot more capacity to do that with her than I do now. I don’t know if it’s that we’re in different life stages or what, but what about you? Were you able as a mother early on to sit and play with your kids, or were you distracted by intellectual things?

Rosanna Warren 

I was distracted, possibly by intellectual things, but also, as happens in many families, my own parents were getting seriously ill and dying when my children were young. I was squeezed with having to take care of elderly, suffering people and very young children, and teach, so I was certainly distracted. Reading aloud was always a very big part of our family life, from my husband and myself reading with our children every night and having supper together and talking, trying, no matter what was going on, to have some core to family life, even with all the other emergencies that were around us. 

Something I learned as a parent, not when the children were small but as they were getting to be teenagers, one of the most painful things was that there were things happening in my children’s lives that I couldn’t fix. They skinned their knee, you can bring out the band aid and the magic words and the hugs, but inevitably, life is gonna hurt them in some ways that Mom cannot fix. Having to respect boundaries in that way and learn to step back. I guess my answer comes from your question about stepping back and letting them play freely. 

I also want to let them play and make up their own games. There’s so much directive parenting these days, I think it’s important to let children figure out their own games. But then, there are certain kinds of troubles they’re going to get into. That was maybe the hardest thing for me as a parent to understand, that there were certain things I could not fix—and then figuring out, well, what can you do? Maybe you can just try to be somehow present without being pushy. It’s hard. I can tell you, I haven’t totally figured it out yet.

Lara Ehrlich  

Let me know if you do. But I think that’s probably true for all mothers and writer mothers. I think the acknowledgement that we’re still figuring it out is a good place to end. Thank you, Rosanna.

Rosanna Warren 

It’s been fascinating to think about these things out loud.

Lara Ehrlich 

Thank you. It’s been such a pleasure.