Angie Estes
(Rome, Italy)
BY Kathy Fagan

Speaking of the medieval reminds me of the craft guilds, and of the path from apprentice to master. Any parallels with the current literary world, and whether a community of the like-minded is important?

The teacher part of me says, ah, if only we had a kind of medieval craft guild for writing poems! One of the hardest things for apprentice writers to get is that it takes at least as long to learn what poems are and how to write them as it takes to learn what a chair is and how to craft a beautiful, useful one or as long as it takes to become a ballet dancer or a violinist or pianist. And it’s a never-ending process. So yes, I think that both an apprenticeship with a poet and the company of the like-minded can be extremely important for a writer — as long as they’re not mistaken for the real work of a poet, which is mostly long and solitary.

I myself never went to an MFA writing program — or took part in writing workshops — so my own sense of how one becomes a poet is a very traditional, pre-writing program one: poets read and read, study the work of other writers, pay attention to the world, and write. And a very large part of me agrees with Mallarmé when, in his essay “Art for All,” he says, “Whatever is sacred, whatever is to remain sacred, must be clothed in mystery.”

Returning to the idea of the world that can be “read” — it seems that such an awareness would go hand-in-hand with an urgency to explore. What role has travel played in your life?

I think you’re right that the experience of reading or writing a poem and the actual experience of travel are very much the same for me, both of them arising out of that “urgency to explore” or “read” the world. The wonderful thing about travel is that all of your senses become aroused and engaged — it’s kind of like the sacrament of communion or transubstantiation — so that transport and translation, both literally and figuratively, are manifest and inevitable. And whenever there is human experience, there is language, so whether it’s foreign travel — with its necessity for literal translation — or travel to the backyard or across town or to a cookbook, the “transport” that may eventually inform a poem begins.

Chez Nous
BY Angie Estes
(Oberlin College Press, 2005)

My poem “Sans Serif,” from Chez Nous is one that I think of especially in this connection. There were two objects that gave rise to the poem: a piece of opera cake that I ate in Paris and a nineteenth-century green glass flacon de l’opera (a cylindrical glass flask which could be filled with brandy and, to keep it warm, tucked between the breasts by women attending the opera), which I found in an antique shop in Culpeper, Virginia. I myself became intoxicated with the sound of “op” — and the poem took off from there.

French language and culture are a recurrent presence in your work. When did this passion arise?

I’m not sure when my passion for all things French began, but it has been, as you say, of enormous importance for my work. It seems that at some point midway through my life (to paraphrase Dante), all of the things that most compelled me — language, architecture, food, wine, social ritual, the medieval world, art, music — especially Josephine Baker and Erik Satie — all of those things were French. And my love of American writers such as Hemingway and, especially, Gertrude Stein fueled my desire to discover what it was that could lead someone like Stein to become an expatriate and say, “America is my country and Paris is my hometown.” In fact, the whole question of what and where a home can be — and the effects of having, naming, or not having one — very much informed the poems in Chez Nous. And, of course, there’s just the French language itself — so gorgeous and sinuous, so evocative and endlessly intriguing.

Voiceover
BY Angie Estes
(Oberlin College Press, 2002)

In my second book, Voice-Over, as well as in my most recent book, Tryst, the language and culture of Italy, too, have been so much a part of my work. I’ve always loved what Stein says in her book Paris France: “After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.”

“… a good translation / should have some memory / of its original language” — these lines in the final poem of Tryst could also speak towards the ekphrastic challenge of not only recapturing what has been portrayed, but also in converting art into the language of poetry…

I love the connection you make here between ekphrastic poems and translation; both indeed do need to have some “memory” of their “original” language or medium and construction. I think that my process of writing about specific art works is the same as my process in writing any poem. Both begin with “divine details”— one notices, remembers this and this and that, then sees the other — and then those details make a shape that can eventually become a grid for a reader’s/viewer’s experience. But at the center of both is transport and transformation: things lift out of their original contexts in order to form a new and — as Jane Eyre says — “other and more vivid” experience.