Angie Estes (Rome, Italy) BY Kathy Fagan ANGIE ESTES‘ poems often portray a consistently refined vision of history, the arts and other subjects with rapid maneuvers, a sure hand, and an artistry that can, to quote Stephen Burt, “evidence unsettling claims while still having fun…” Her four poetry collections are Tryst (2009); Chez Nous (2005); and Voice-Over (2002), which won the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize as well as the Poetry Society of America’s 2001 Alice Fay di Castagnola Award (all from Oberlin College Press), and The Uses of Passion (Gibbs Smith, 1995), which won the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. A recipient of fellowships, grants, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, and the MacDowell Colony, among others, Estes is currently on the faculty of Ashland University’s low-residency MFA program. She is also a contributing editor for the literary magazine The Journal. Visit her website at www.angieestes.com.

“For the medieval mind, everything bristles with meaning — nothing is static. And the active, engaged mind is the mind that can be, and is, transported.” — Angie Estes Several of your poems concern words as visual artifacts, drawing from illuminated manuscripts or typography. How did you discover this reverence for beauty and workmanship, for the “divine detail”? For as long as I can remember I’ve had a very strong sense of what you term “divine detail” in the world — beginning perhaps with my realization that the butter my grandmother made in the mountains of Virginia tasted incredibly different than the store-bought butter I ate at home in suburban Maryland. And the ham. And the potatoes. In my Uncle Osie’s chair factory, I watched unremarkable lengths of walnut turned on lathes to become the legs and rungs and backs of chairs, and I followed my Aunt Evelyn out in the dark at 5 a.m. to milk the cows in the muddy barn, then watched her pour the milk through a dish towel clothes-pinned over the top of the separator as the milk and cream went their separate ways. Those, too, tasted like things from another world, a world I could partake of by means of those things. Above all, my sense was always that there was a connection between who these people were, the lives they lived, and the “divine details” that made up those lives. But even though I experienced all of this and carried it inside me, I could never take it with me, transport it to and evoke those experiences in any other place. And then there was the Baptist church — the hymns, the prayers, the communion, the scripture, the hellfire and damnation sermons, and the revivals: the insistent belief in metaphor and symbol and language, and the insistent conviction that there is a connection between this world and some “other.” All of this, too, made clear that the “divine details” — of a life, of the world, of language — were in fact a means of transport or, more precisely, that to partake of those “divine details” was to be already in the process of transport and translation. Much later I encountered Goethe and his belief that nature is the living visible garment of God, along with the British and American Romantics — especially Blake, with his inexhaustible attempts to make language and imagination and visual art into a more profound inhabitation of experience, and Emerson’s essay “Nature,” too, with its amazing image of the “transparent eyeball” one could become while out in nature, where the currents of the human and the universe could mingle and inform each other.

Sainte Chapelle
(Île de la Cité, Paris, France)
BY Angie Estes

And I was enthralled by Emerson’s disciples Dickinson and Melville, with their particular American modern slant on the relationship — not always a pleasant one — between the human and the “divine details” of nature and the universe. Ahab’s invocation to “Hark ye yet again, — the little lower layer” because “All visible objects… are but as pasteboard masks,” along with Rilke’s notion that humans are “the bees of the invisible world” became especially significant for me.

All of this is by way of saying that by the time I encountered medieval writing, art, and architecture, I was primed to fall in love with it. For in a sense I’d been doing a kind of medieval “anagogical” thinking most of life — reading the details of this world in the light of some other world. And I love the whole medieval idea that the world is something that can be read. All of this really came together for me when I read the work of Abbot Suger, who placed gold and precious stones and objets in the chapel of St. Denis and wrote about how aesthetic pleasure and beauty could give rise to mystical ecstasy, how the light from these gems could transport him to “some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of heaven,” by means of which “by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner.”

Has studying medieval works influenced your writing?

Medieval thought, writing, art, and architecture were enormously important to my ideas about what a poem can be. For the medieval mind, everything bristles with meaning — nothing is static. And the active, engaged mind is the mind that can be, and is, transported. I think of a poem as one of those things in the world that is filled with “divine details,” and the poem is an arranged place — like the golden chalices, rubies, emeralds, and stained glass windows of Abbot Suger’s chapel — where experience happens. And although this is in some ways a very modernist way of talking about art and poetry, it also has a long lineage, running back through Wallace Stevens and Dickinson — and at least back to medieval thinkers and writers. Flannery O’Connor, too, in her essays about writing fiction, talks about the importance of anagogical thinking.

And of course, the medieval delight in the things of the world, in “divine detail,” is in itself an inexhaustible fascination for both reader and writer. Medieval authors and artists offer perhaps our greatest example of the human imagination in the constant act of reading and writing the world.

The Annunciation, c. 1437-1446
BY Fra Angelico
(Firenze, San Marco, Entrata del Dormitorio)
San Marco Museum

READ AN EXCERPT FROM “San Marco Suite”
BY Angie Estes

Fra Angelico has inspired poems in both Tryst and Voice-Over. What draws you to his art?

Yes, as I was just saying, I believe that a work of art — or a poem — must make an arrangement that creates an experience for a viewer or reader, that pulls the viewer into the work of art so that something happens to the viewer. This seems to me a central preoccupation of medieval thought and art, and Fra Angelico is a master of creating these visual arrangements that are powerful and involving experiences. In his frescoes at San Marco in Firenze, for example, the painting in each of the monk’s cells invokes a moving meditation on a significant moment in the life of Christ but does so within the architectural context specific to each individual cell, thus invoking a kind of anagogical tension between past and present, human and divine, sacred and mundane. Likewise, at the top of the staircase leading up to the cells, Fra Angelico embraces the viewer with his Annunciation, the rainbow hues of the heavenly angel’s wing glistening with the earthly silica Fra Angelico has mixed into his paint.

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.

Tryst BY Angie Estes (Oberlin College Press, 2009) From the Publisher: “In her poem ‘Love Letters,’ Angie Estes writes, ‘I cover secrets, break me and read.’ And indeed, throughout Tryst, Estes’ fourth and most personal collection, the poet gets straight to the heart of love, language, and memory. Details from the rural Appalachian lives of Estes’ own family yield to meditations on ’40s film stars, medieval saints, ancient Romans — and vice-versa. We learn that gold leaf is applied with a brush fashioned out of squirrel tail, Nijinsky invented a fountain pen he called God, and female prisoners of the concentration camp at Terezin composed recipes to be tasted only in memory: all part of the human passion to create, destroy, and above all, be known. Estes’ tryst here is with history and the way it absorbs everything and everyone, leaving words, those most articulate of witnesses, behind…”

Tryst has turned towards more personal territory, mentioning family in several poems.There seems to be a little more of a narrative thread, too. Do you view these newer works as a departure or evolution in your writing? I’m not sure I know the answer to your question at this point, but at the moment I’m thinking that these newer territories are an evolution/extension of my previous poems. One of the reasons I say this is that both of the things you mention — the “more personal” and the inclusion of a little more narrative — just showed up in my work; it wasn’t a conscious decision to include more of either. My poems have always felt — to me — already so intensely personal, although I can certainly understand their not coming across that way, in any conventional sense, to a reader. But I think I’ve always been uneasy with “personal” detail and “narrative thread” in a poem, mostly because of their tendency to claim some “authentic” realm of experience that doesn’t feel to me to be the experience the poem is really enacting or giving rise to. In any case, I’m intrigued by the way that a bit more of the personal and narrative have entered the poems — and my guess is that the narrative has trailed in behind the “personal” details and events. I don’t think, however, that my newer poems have any more of an overall narrative structure, even though they contain narrative moments. I’m sure, too, that getting older necessarily creates more distance, an eerie simultaneous embracing of and estrangement from the personal details and events of early life, and that that distance enables all of those things to appear in different contexts. The writer Jeanette Winterson, in a recent essay, says something that seems to me to be related to the kind of “narrative” I’m most interested in; she writes, “Every work of art is an attempt to bring into being the object of loss.” “Heart” melds the curious anecdote of the brain with a recollection. The tenacity of a seemingly precocious child, the parents waiting in the car — almost a reversal of what one might expect from family vacations — is delightful, but also tinged with a certain sadness. Is a mixing of tones and topics vital to your process? Yes, when I look at my work, it does seems that my poems are often structured by a mixing of tones and topics, although, again, my sense is that those mixtures and layers of things and experiences are already what constitute the world and our experience of it so that the job of the poem is to heighten our experience of our experience in some way. As Baudelaire says, “The only way to inhabit the present is to revisit it in a work of art.” In “Heart,” the scientific and anthropological details regarding the eating of dead relatives lead to the memory of the mother and the inevitable question posed by the poem of what her heart would taste like, which is another way of talking about the complexities and difficulties of intimacy with, and the ultimate loss of, the mother. So the image of the parents waiting in the car like “daguerreotypes” — fixed, immobile, and isolated from the speaker — works, I think, something like a metaphysical conceit, zooming back to the child’s search for some ideal “antebellum” place and then to the image of Mary grieving for the dead Christ: the sense of loss and separation culminate and break through at that moment, that jarring turn in the poem, with the lines “this what’s the matter / of the cerebellum.” What do you look forward to in your next work? Well, I mostly look forward to just having new poems arrive, whatever they might be. Much of my new work, though, does seem to be very interested in Dante, especially his Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Dante — in completely unpredictable ways — somehow got into the poems of my most recent book, Tryst. And now he’s kind of taken over. What’s compelling for me, continually, is the way in which the world of Dante and the contemporary world — Marlon Brando, even — speak to each other.