An Interview with Katherine Soniat
-by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: I like
how “The Autumn Sketchbook” opens in a clear, narrative mode and then, as you travel through time via your father’s
sketchbook, the poem breaks down into a more associative, imagistic form. What is it about a poem that allows it to
change like this?
Katherine Soniat: To answer this question is similar to reentering a dream at
the midway point… I believe that memory is both uncertain/unreliable and willfully exact at once, and that
there is a lot to discover beneath the concrete imagery of memory, if one pursues the process.
In
starting with the literal facts of this sketchbook, the poem becomes more and more comfortable with drifting away from the
central narrative. By the end of the poem, the paper-world of notebook is gone, and the fragmented realm of birdsong and trees
is entered…and even in that locale the father reappears, almost birdlike, and most surely as yet another
of those “whistlers” who live in a setting where language is not primary.
So, I suppose the poem comes full circle in that it tells part of the father’s story, some of the daughter’s,
and then as it enters the natural world those two figures (father and daughter) resurface as part of the initial fabric of
the landscape: the mountains, birds and trees.
AMK: It’s interesting how you use the sketchbook
to study the inner thoughts of your father’s mind, much like an artist’s “study” of a bowl on a table
or, in this case, your father’s herring bone cap. Do you think of the poem as a way to study figures in your life?
KS: Oh yes, a poem is indeed an artistic “life study,” one which begins with the
literal point of focus then slowly shifts to create another primary shape, shades, and deeper implications. I think that’s
almost, but not quite, what my answer was to the preceding question. So right now we are experiencing that subtle refinement
as I respond to your questions.
AMK: Do you mind telling us a little bit about your father?
He sounds interesting.
KS: My father was an Annapolis graduate, career Navy, who then went off
to work with Nasa on the moon project. He did not enter my life until I was three and was then quickly deleted by divorce.
In other words, his training and intellect were quite different from mine, and I actually knew little of him as a father,
or as a person. The same was true of my relationship with my mother in many ways. Much poetry is created out of absence
and uncertainty-- like connecting a few known points in the sky to finally see the constellation of a ghost-ship emerge. I
recognize that image as descriptive of the poetic process in much of my work.
AMK: Do you mind
telling us a little bit about how this poem came to be? Meaning, first, how did you conceive of it? And, second,
what sort of process did you undertake to compose it; how/why did it change over time?
KS: This
poem was an act of discovery, about myself and about my father. When he died I was left his writing desk and, in one of its
compartments, was this sketchbook with notes about an art class taken at the community college when he was in his eighties.
My father and art seemed antithetical to me, given his engineering and military background.
But when I opened
this book and came to pages of those shadowy, carefully rendered studies of a skull, I was hooked. Going through all
the sketches, his notes, and working on this poem, I slowly came to see the workings of the mind of a man I barely knew. He,
almost literally, surfaces in the poem: in particular, the struggles he had with letting go of conceptual and theoretical
reality, and how finally engagement with the imagination of an “artist” was impossible for him.
But more than that, I found my reactions to his sketchbook placed my story in relationship to his, and that at the end of
the poem, he appears as the haunting and resonant image: the “whistler.” Could I have foreseen the
discovery of my father as a bird before this poem.. Of course not!
Perhaps the impetus of my writing has been
to take the long silences and frail tonal implications and to give them the outline of language, so to speak. The way
in which this poem disintegrates and reincorporates is suggestive, to me, of the visceral longevity of generations in a family.
Regarding how the poem changed over time, this notebook came to my attention a few years ago. I began a rough draft
of this poem and put it away for two years. That incubation period allowed a lot of force to gather around the initial draft.
Revision was a matter of connecting the sections and finding an overall coherence.
AMK: I like
how this poem is clearly not about a sketchbook but about the relationship between father and daughter. I’m wondering
why write a poem this way? Why use the trope of the sketchbook rather than just speak directly?
KS:
Well, as I implied earlier , this poem comes from an exceptional lack of knowledge of another person. If I had had
more of a relationship with my father, more details to recall, then the narrative would not have the lyric fluidity that comes
from uncertainty.
AMK: At the end of the poem, after you’ve made this journey
through the sketchbook, composing your own precise study of your father’s art, you then take the sketchbook and make
it your own, writing observations about birds on its blank pages, which become fragmented lines of poetry in and of themselves.
Do you feel that art is one way in which you access that part of the mind that can merge sensory fragments, experience,
and emotion into verse?
KS: For me, poetry is the subtle work of the “middle mind”
that accesses the rational, the literal, and the subliminal at once. So, yes, art does offer that delicate tertiary
area of merger. Two fiction writers who exemplify this type of poetic latitude, for me, are Haruki Murakami and W.G. Sebald.
I love just about every book they have written! Each narrative is a long poem wandering about in costume.
AMK:
You write a lot of good poems about art, particularly paintings. What are some of the joys of writing about
art? What are its pitfalls?
KS: When I write poems about art, I have lived with the
imagery of the paintings for quite a while and also have read extensively about the artist’s life. By the time
I am ready to write a poem, the focus has more to do with a certain artistic sensibility rather than a piece of
art, per se. Many times one poem will consider, and use, imagery from several different paintings at once. Of course, with
such rich pastiche, one’s own life begins to attach to various points in the poem.
For me, the central problem
with poems written about art is that the verse may become a disembodied entity that is a sterile replication of the imagery,
and no more. In other words, the poem may be beautifully crafted but it does not suggest anything further than the painting
itself.
AMK: What, most of all, should we take away from “The Autumn Sketchbook?”
KS: To recall the power of mutability as it occurs in our lives and in the process of writing. Preconception
does little for art, or for us as we navigate the journey ahead. Of course, we plan and plan, but must also be ready to relinquish
those desires to a not fully recognizable design.
AMK: Thank you.
KS:
Thank you for such provocative and finely focused questions about my poem and about the process of writing, Andy. I have learned
a lot!
