NIN ANDREWS
This book (Where the Dead Are) covers a lot of territory with poems about art and travel, and many poems about death. Yet when I read it, I felt that I was reading a long elegy to your son, Stephen. Was that your intention?
WANDA S. PRAISNER
No, it wasn’t. But I love that CKP chose to include the poems about Stephen.
NIN ANDREWS
I was so taken with the title poem, “Where the Dead Are.” But it tells such a disturbing story! Your grandmother used to tell you that if you didn’t clean your plate, the buzzards would get you?
WANDA S. PRAISNER
Yes. On visits from Germany, my grandmother said the big black birds would come and eat my food, and me, if I didn’t finish my plate. It was stated matter-of-factly, like something you’d read in a fairy tale (she was big on them)–never in a menacing way, more like something she’d heard as a child and passed on. She was the story-teller in the family, full of fun. It was I, overly sensitive and imaginative, who believed her every word.
NIN ANDREWS
I think the writing of each book is a unique experience. Writing a first book, for example, can feel very different from writing a second or third book. I was wondering if you could talk about how your writing process has evolved.
WANDA S. PRAISNER
I began to write for the first time after my son died—piles of “poems” I’ve never shared. That was a healing process. Then the need to learn the craft and practice, like learning to play an instrument. I was thrust into an alien world and sought to discover where I was and how to survive. Then to make music.
My first book, A Fine and Bitter Snow, is mostly a chronicle of what it means to lose a child, yes, an elegy. Yet a third of the poems are about others, because I’m drawn to the dignity, drama and courage in everyday life—the lives of others, known or unknown, living or dead, and how we’re connected. In fact, my second book, On the Bittersweet Avenues of Pomona contains no “Stephen poems.” They do thread through Where the Dead Are, as well as in my new manuscript, Sometimes When Something Is Singing. I have a lot of them, they keep coming, and sometimes I remove them from a manuscript, and sometimes they stay.
NIN ANDREWS
One of my favorite poems about your son is “Snow Globe.” It’s so understated, intimate, and moving.
WANDA S. PRAISNER
“Snow Globe” is an old poem, probably from 1996. It was difficult while teaching and raising a family to find time to get all the poems to where they needed to be. It was once twice as long; it won a prize.
I have many hundreds of poems that haven’t made it into the computer.
Snow Globe
for S.J.P. 1967-1986
A mother and child enclosed,
sledding down a hill
that looks much like the one
outside my window—
green now with clover,
wild rose. Honeysuckle blooms,
no memory of January.
An orb of orange moon appears.
I stroke the glass,
shake and shake the sphere
until a snowstorm
hides the pair from view.
Wet and cold you kept on,
didn’t want to come in.
After hot cocoa you asked,
“Is it my short
or long nap now?”
Short, I answered,
pulling down the shades.
NIN ANDREWS
You write ekphrastic poetry, which I so admire. I especially like the opening poem. I think it can be quite challenging to write poems about art because the reader can’t see the work. Would you say a few words about ekphrastic poetry?
WANDA S. PRAISNER
I’ve written a lot of ekphrastic poems—perhaps because I started out as an art major. (In the twenty-nine years I taught, I did a pastel sketch of every student.) I find it easy to enter & inhabit a work of art, but one must allow the self to disappear to allow the art. It’s about going deeper, asking questions, discovering. And so many elements of poetry are in the other arts as well—such as texture, setting, image, repetition, feeling, flow, form, imagination, detail. I remember a George Segal plaster sculpture I saw in Seattle, “Woman on a Bed.” In her left hand was a pair of real nylon panties! Talk about detail.
NIN ANDREWS
I was wondering if you would talk a little about your writing process? Do you write every day? How do you edit your poems? How do you know when a poem is finished?
WANDA S. PRAISNER
I agree with Thomas Hardy in that a poet takes heed of nothing he does not feel. That’s where it starts with me: an image, a memory, a phrase–and if I don’t get something down immediately, it’s lost. Then the labor of going through time and space in search of truth—striving to reveal mystic truths.
I don’t get to the computer every day, but even jogging the park trail, I’m revising a troublesome line—or with luck, discovering a new poem. (My manuscript, The Natirar Poems, 2008-9 came about this way.) Each week I go to a U.S. 1 Poets’ Cooperative in Princeton where I get feedback. This helps me maneuver the creation to where it wants to go. It’s a mysterious process, and often one is clueless. When nothing in the poem bothers me, I let it settle, then read it aloud. Then I’ll know if it’s “finished.”
NIN ANDREWS
This is a large book by poetry book standards. It feels very complete. How long have you been working on this book? How did it evolve?
WANDA S. PRAISNER
Actually, the manuscript, submitted three years ago, was twice the size. After my second book came out in 2006, I began compiling all the poems into different orders and sizes—adding new ones, deleting the old. The title stayed the same. I liked the idea that we are affected by those who have gone before, that they are, in a sense, still with us.
NIN ANDREWS
What poets and writers have influenced you the most?
WANDA S. PRAISNER
Poets who have influenced me: Stephen Dunn (my mentor), Maxine Kumin, Sharon Olds, Lucille Clifton, Marie Howe, Linda Paston, Stanley Kunitz, Spencer Reece, Oscar Wilde, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Writers: Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Luigi Pirandello, Herman Manville, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov.
NIN ANDREWS
I heard you read at AWP, and it was such a lovely reading. You had a child and grandchildren there? I think it’s safe to assume that your family is very interested in and supportive of your writing career?
WANDA S. PRAISNER
Yes, my entire family is supportive and interested in my writing career. My husband, Bob, drove me six-and-a-half hours through Storm Saturn’s sixteen inches of snow to get me to the AWP reading! My youngest son, Tom, & his wife, Cindy, (who help me with computer stuff) and my grandchildren, Tommy, Sarah, & Jason, traveled from CT to hear me read. My oldest son couldn’t attend because he had office hours, back in NJ.
NIN ANDREWS
I’d love to close with a poem of your choice, and any closing remarks you’d like to add.
WANDA S. PRAISNER
Like Pickwick, I’ve been “an observer of human nature,” I’ve paid attention.
T.S. Elliot said poetry is really only one person talking to another. A PNC billboard: Everyone has a story. Tell us yours. I do believe we are all poets—but only some of us take the time to put things down.
Overcast October First
A friend called from the UK,
wished me Happy Rabbit’s Day, luck
for the first of the month, a family custom.
Here too it’s fog, no luck finding
the great blue heron, actually gray, absent
since leaves began to fall. Like time,
when you look for it, it’s never there–
September and all its losses gone–
I cut short my son’s last call to watch TV,
told my mother in the hospital
I’d visit in the evening–
the silence now of words never spoken.
My friend ended the call
with Happy White Rabbit’s Day,
what his granddaughter wished him earlier,
but I’m still with gray: the rabbit’s foot
my grandfather gave me after butchering one
for supper, I not knowing what luck was,
still don’t. But I know gray: squirrels
crossing the meadow, nuts carried
in mouths for burial; a rabbit foot matted
in blood; the heron spending time elsewhere,
gone without a goodbye—
no well-wishes, not even See you later.
Published in Prairie Schooner
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