Clare Rossini
December 2007

Clare Rossini’s third collection, Lingo, was published by the University of Akron Press in 2006.  Selections from the Claudia Poems,  an art-book edition, was published by the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts in 1996;  Winter Morning with Crow, a full-length collection, was selected by Donald Justice for the l996 Akron Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a Small Press Book Award as well as PEN’s l999 Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. Rossini’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry, Poets for the New Century, and the Best American Poetry series.  She has received fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Maxwell Shepherd Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Bush Foundation.. Rossini is currently on the faculty of Trinity College in Hartford and the MFA program at Vermont College in Montpelier, VT.  She lives in West Hartford with her husband and son.


Statement

We’re so lucky to have language.  What if we’d never gotten beyond grunting and pointing?  I wouldn’t have done well as a Neanderthal; I would’ve sat in my cave and wept all day.  Rilke says that all good poetry is written out of necessity.  I used to think he meant that poets must have subject matter that is important to them, something they have an urgent need to tell the world.  Now I believe Rilke was talking about something more primitive: the need to exorcise thought and feeling from the welter of blind turns and dead ends that consciousness sometimes seems, unbearably so.  What a relief, to get those flies of the mind, those gnats of the heart, outside oneself at last, in the light and air.
My husband is a painter, and he often says he envies poets—“You guys can just come out and say what you mean,” he says.  Oh, honey!  Mine has been a long abidance with words, and I still feel the frustration of how often they come up short.  There’s this diffuse image-thought-energy-emotion nebula floating around in the head, with patches of darkness and quivers of light.  And on the page, draft after draft after draft, all taking stabs at getting it down, much less getting it right.  The writing process is a long interior conversation, with all parts of the self, and it dwindles at times to a self-interrogation, without the strobes.  What comes out of all this?  Sometimes pitifully little. Death, especially, exposes the limitations of language.  Every funeral or memorial service I’ve been to has made me aware that language, like some kind of old-fashioned, fussy wallpaper, merely covers over all the bumps and crevasses.  On the other hand, without hymns or homilies or poems, how would we deal with the rotten luck of our mortality?  Let’s face it, after awhile, the silence gets to you.

—And when a poem is good, when it accrues the energy of thought wedded to feeling, when the rhythm and sounds converge with conviction and energy, the images popping and then giving pleasure with their right-on-ness—“ain’t it wonderful?” as my German Grandma’d say.  Poetry goes two ways—it preserves our relationship with language, reminding us what a resource words are; and it reawakens our attachment to the world—the earth and all within and beyond.  Speaking of the earth (and we all should be thinking and speaking of the earth these days) let us remember that poetry is the greenest of the arts.  It’s low-tech, portable, recycles easily.  Perhaps only dance can be made with as little environmental impact, but most dancers I know like some lights, please, a little music, and might we have a stage?    All that’s needed to perform a poem is a tongue, a pair of lungs, and a memory.  That’s why poetry was the first of the arts.  The nomads could bring poems with ‘em; the farmers could sing as they tilled.   Nothing like a poem to liven the hour between dinner and sleep on the bedrock bed.

There’s been a lot written in the past two decades about poetry’s peripheral status in relation to the other arts and to the culture at large.  But it’s not only poetry’s problem.  It’s the Word’s, in whatever form—newspapers, novels, letters.    The screens are everywhere, baldly brilliant on freeways (have you seen the new video billboards?); shining in briefcases; popping up within themselves, screen within screen within screen.  Technology is a good thing; I’m all for the CAT scan and the p.c.  At the same time, the day is still 24 hours long, and all those seductive visuals, in whatever form, take time and energy from more introspective activities: reading, thinking, good ole plain-vanilla daydreaming.  One could argue that culture begins in daydream, the fuzzy sense of something still-to-be given shape, an image or sound floating through the head like a cumulus through the sky. 

I remember once reading an article in the New York Times magazine about a religious order whose members spent most of their waking hours in prayer.  When one of them was asked why she did it, the woman said that she felt that she was keeping alive a relationship with something powerful or intangible, a mystery.  She then finished by saying, “And if we didn’t do this, who would?”  I love the confident sass of that, the presumption of the work’s importance.  What to do about the agon between the screen and the word?  One answer, the most obvious one—keep writing.  If you don’t, who will?

Author photograph by Pablo Delano.

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