An Interview with Elizabeth Hadaway, author of Fire Baton

Why is the book called Fire Baton?  Can you twirl fire baton?

As a little kid, I took baton lessons--until I broke my finger trying to get into a car and hold a baton at the same time.  Putting fire in my hands would be criminal negligence. Fire baton twirlers used to practice a few houses up the ridge from mine, and watching them gave me aesthetic ambition—the impulse to make something dangerous and beautiful. 

Is poetry dangerous?

Poetry can be dangerous in lots of ways.  I doubt that a coalition of fundamentalists, college professors, and NASCAR fans will off me for criticizing my native cultures (I’m from a mountain whirlpool in the New River of Virginia where those three streams run together), but better poets than I’ll ever be have been imprisoned or executed for expressing unpopular views.  More often, poetry is dangerous for writers and readers because it takes us to places we weren’t expecting and may not be equipped to handle.  For example, I had the start of a shiny academic career in creative writing: the University of Virginia of Virginia , the University of North Carolina at Greensboro , Stanford University University in California . I walked away from it because I was in love with John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins and W.H. Auden; I wanted to write with their theological depth but I had a lousy background in theology.  So I threw myself on the mercy of the Episcopal Church. They gave me two years at Virginia Theological Seminary, with the goal of improving my poetry as a form of ministry.     

What effect did going to seminary have on your poetry?

I’m still trying to figure that out.   I wrote many of the poems in Fire Baton before I went—it’s more about adolescence, Appalachia, and California than the poems I’m writing now are.  One thing seminary showed me is that arguing with God—which my poems do—is an ancient tradition, and much more engaging than arguing about God.    Auden says the ideal school for poets would teach, among other things, Greek, Hebrew, liturgics, and cooking, and every student would garden and look after a domestic animal.  After seminary, in rectory life with the priest I met and married there, I have most of that covered.  If my husband counts as a domestic animal.

Why are so many of your poems in rhyme and meter?

The poem on the page is just sheet music.  To really feel a poem, you have to say it out loud, let the sounds roll around in your mouth and down your throat.  You know a poem and it’s in your blood.  Blood has a beat, if it’s in a living body.  When I started writing, as a very young girl, I imitated the things my family quoted.  My dad went around chanting Robert Service verse about gold mining in the Yukon: we had this routine where I’d recite “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” up to the point where Dan “tilted the poke of dust on the bar and called for . . .” and Dad would roar out “Drinks on the house!” I was also isolated: small mountain town, no bookstores; most of my books came from the A-1 Flea Market.  So I was reading Christopher Marlowe and John Keats in those old editions where the page was divided up into two columns and there weren’t any footnotes to intrude—I just read aloud to try to figure the strange words out, and because it sounded so good.  

Some of my teachers tried to convince me that formal poetry, that is, poetry in meter and often in rhyme, was out of style and so I shouldn’t write it.  That never made sense to me.  Obviously, English is a living language and our vocabulary is always changing.  I don’t use words like “o’er” or “morn” in my poems because I don’t use them when I speak.  I use slang, because I speak slang.  But I don’t just transcribe my slangy stream of consciousness.  Why would anyone want to read that?  If a poem has funny or surprising rhymes, if its rhythm pleases me—then I want to keep on reading.

Does working in rhyme ever get in your way?

It helps me get a handle on slippery emotions, like grief and anger.  A lot of my poems are angry—anyone paying attention to what we’re doing to the world sees plenty to be angry about—but poetry shouldn’t just be ranting.  That’s what blogs are for.  Poetry comes from the impulse to make something admirable out of that anger, and you can’t do that if you’re focused on how angry you are.

Form can also fend off self-censorship.  I tend to judge myself quickly: can’t say that, no, that sounds stupid; am I hurting my gay friends’ feelings or betraying feminism if I write that I’m happy to be married?  Occupying that censor in my brain with technical problems—Hey, judge!  Find a rhyme for effulgent!—frees the rest of my mind to say things I never would otherwise.     

Is that need to fight self-censorship especially strong because you’re from Appalachia?

People from Appalachia have to deal not only with urban and suburban America’s stereotypes about us, but with the fact that we’ve watched all the same TV shows they have, so we’ve absorbed those stereotypes.  The fact is that the mountains—the ones that are left—are places of spectacular beauty, and the way people talk there can be downright courtly.  I hear more civility there than I’ve heard anywhere else.  But stereotype leads to a vending machine in Virginia that sells “hillbilly teeth” along with souvenir keychains and bouncy balls.  I have to make fun of that, if I’m not going to vandalize it.  And it’s in high culture, too.  There’s a technically very proficient photographer who did a series called “Appalachian Folk” that included a great-aunt of mine.   She’s out in her cornpatch in an old straw hat and work dress.  The picture’s titled “She Made ‘em Mind” and the caption makes her sound like Granny Clampett.  It doesn’t mention that she’d gone to New York, earned a master’s degree from Columbia, and come back because she preferred the mountains.