Smith Creative Writers Reading Series: Suzanne Cleary

Contributed

Penn State Behrend Creative Writing student Alivia Anderson interviewed poet Suzanne Cleary ahead of her visit to campus on Thursday, Oct. 16 as part of the Smith Creative Writers Reading series.

Suzanne Cleary's latest collection of poetry, The Odds (New York Quarterly Books), won the 2024 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award. Her other books include Keeping Time (Carnegie Mellon UP), Trick Pear (Carnegie Mellon UP), Crude Angel (BkMk Press), and Beauty Mark (BkMk Press), which won the 2013 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, and the Patterson Award for Literary Excellence. Her collection Blue Cloth won the 2004 Sunken Garden Poetry Festival chapbook competition. She's the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared widely in anthologies and journals, including Best American Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, Southern Review, and Poetry London. She teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Converse College and has degrees from SUNY Oneonta, Washington University, and Indiana University of Pennsylvania. A New York City area resident for over thirty years, Suzanne was born and raised upstate, in Binghamton, New York.

Alivia Anderson (AA): In your poem "Reunion," you mention the class that made you fall in love with poetry. Can you go into more detail on that? What was it about that class that pulled you into poetry? 
Suzanne Cleary (SC): Poetry had never interested me until my senior year of high school when I enrolled in Poetry Workshop solely because the class fit well in my schedule. Our teacher, a poet named Joseph Lisowski, had us read poems by contemporary poets (e.g. Robert Bly, James Wright, Adrienne Rich), and then we'd write poems modeled after them. This was the first time I'd read poets who used language that sounded like the language I used, rather than the language used by Emily Dickinson or William Shakespeare, whose work I could not yet appreciate. In Poetry Workshop I discovered that a poem can describe small moments of an ordinary life; attention can reveal how large that life really is. I began to look more intensely at my own ordinary life. I wanted to live with my eyes open, so as to discover poems all around me.

AA: There are some poems in your collection The Odds that are addressed to people you know or have seen. Do you ever get worried you'll portray them inaccurately in your works? Or is that of little concern to you? 
SC: Most of the people who appear in The Odds are poets, so they understand that any portrait is a mixture of the realistic and the imagined. They understand that poems are not dependably true in the usual sense of that word; if need be, a poet changes facts in order to strengthen the poem. Still, I would never publish any poem that paints an unkind portrait of a real person or that would in any way embarrass someone. My rare political tirades remain in my notebook, not least because they're not very good poems.

AA: What are your artistic inspirations? Are there any poets, or poems, that have influenced you? Modernist poets? Romantic poets? 
SC: If I had to name my three favorite poets they would be John Keats, Walt Whitman, and Elizabeth Bishop. I love their imagery, clarity, music, imagination. Bishop is the only 20th century poet I've mentioned, but I should also note that William Carlos Williams and other Modernist poets have been very important to me for their interest in the world around them. And there are lots of poets writing today whose work I treasure and read.

AA: I've noticed that in some of your works, such as "Glove" and "To the Person at the Zoom Poetry Reading, Unmuted, Doing Hand Laundry," you touch upon some real-life issues, such as protests, police brutality, and racism. To what extent can poetry be used to address political issues? Do you enjoy expressing these views in your works? 
SC: Any subject that moves you can result in a good poem if you spend enough time crafting it. Passion alone is never enough, and passion sometimes drowns subtlety and complexity. I believe that the personal is political and also that there is a political dimension to almost any poem. I love Louise Gluck's observation that even the most hermetic of poems is a political argument for the value of the inner life. That said, my overtly political poems tend to be narrative poems based on things that I've personally experienced.

AA: When it comes to starting a new piece of work, what usually comes first? A subject? A form? Maybe the ending?  
SC: Usually my poems begin with an image or a line, something I've seen or heard, which just gets stuck in my head. Then I write it down. Sometimes that's all that happens, but sometimes I describe it, associations arise, and a poem begins to takes shape. I never want to know where my poem will end; I want the poem to reveal that to me because the subconscious mind is so much richer than the conscious. If I ever do begin a poem and immediately see where it's headed, I set that poem off to the side and give it time to incubate, develop.

AA: Lastly, do you have any advice for aspiring poets? Ones who struggle to find their own style and voice? 
SC: Read! Then read some more! Read poetry, but also read anything that interests you, for your interests will feed your poetry as well as enrich your life. Let your poems be fueled by your curiosity, by exploration, and discovery. Follow your poems, don't lead. Don't worry about developing your style and your voice. You already are uniquely yourself.

Alivia Anderson, a student in the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Behrend, interviewed poet Suzanne Cleary in anticipation of her visit to Behrend as part of the Smith Creative Writers Reading Series. Cleary will read from her work on Thursday, Oct. 16, at 6:00
p.m. in the Metzgar building. For more information visit: behrend.psu.edu/readings