Apart from your numerous prose publications, you have written narratives based in nature writing as well as a memoir. They synthesize to form a set of rich, personal accounts of life in France. Yet, you began writing as a poet. Your fifth collection of poetry, Shades of the Other Shore, is coming soon. What does poetry satisfy that the nature narrative and other genres do not?

This is an important question on several levels, particularly when you use the word satisfy. I feel satisfaction should be subverted in poetry. The best poems have an evocative discomfort that compels us to come back to them again and again with a sense of wonder. It is this discomfort that gives the poem a life beyond its last line, the irreconcilable paradoxes of human experience. While poetry is an art of language, the best poems have a sense of truth that transcends words. Language seems to have its own built-in intelligence. When writing poems, I feel like an opportunist, maybe even a treasure hunter. A kind of contact is established with the first line in terms of pace and music. I feel physically a need for a certain utterances before I even know what I will say. The sound dovetails emotional sense. The process is pure imaginative art.

My memoir writing and nature books are different. There’s art to creating setting, characterization, dialogue, narrative tension, and lyrical reflection, but these books are subject-driven.

You’ve collaborated with artists using different mediums: writing poems for The Mirror Visions Ensemble, and now writing alongside Ralph Petty’s new paintings. What inspires you to want to collaborate with other artists, and what has been the result?

I’ve been asked to write a film script, short stories based on themes, and poems for occasions. I am invariably pushed out of my comfort zone, and it is no different when trying to collaborate.

While poetry is an art of language, the best poems have a sense of truth that transcends words.

I was secretly commissioned by the three singers to write the finale of the Mirror Visions 20th Anniversary Celebration to be performed at several venues in Paris and at Merkin Hall in New York City. The finale was meant to be a surprise gift for the Artistic Director, who was also the original creator of Mirror Visions. My poetry would be set by three different composers with a progression of a solo, duo, and trio. It seemed like an impossible assignment, but I managed to generate a poem in three parts that I thought would suffice. It came back with a polite message: “It’s the wrong tone. Too melancholic. Would you try again?” Eventually I wrote a poem inspired by a major work that each of three commissioned composers had produced. We corresponded, tinkering to get the phrasing right. When it all came together, I found the experience very moving.

Work on the book with painter Ralph Petty began with two failed attempts. The first process involved my trying to respond in poetry to Ralph’s beautiful work. But the book itself failed to find a thematic center. My second attempt was a personal essay that didn’t fulfill the aesthetic inclinations of either the editors or publisher — “too narrative.” The third attempt finally worked: a parallel effort. I used Ralph’s river images as leitmotif while writing a sequence of dialog sketches, prose poems, and poetry called Shades of the Other Shore, a title made up from Dante’s Inferno.

In a recent interview, you said that you’re someone who likes to make things; whether it’s building, crafting or cooking. Similarly, in the preface to Shades of the Other Shore, you mention that your writing is grounded in physical things rather than the abstract. Can you explain why this tangibility is important, and how it emerges in your writing?

While I don’t think satisfaction is the business of art, I do get much satisfaction from building a room or a bookcase, restoring parts of our old house, or just going to the market and making a good dinner for my friends. These involve physical activity and engage the senses while producing pleasurable results.

In my preface, I start out by referring to the thingy-ness in the language of the old Anglo-Saxon laments and riddles, how a metaphor, the kenning, is made by juxtaposing two things. It creates a sense of the elemental. Our engagement with the world begins in things, through sensation and senses, and not through abstractions. In poetry or extended metaphor in prose, we put together two disparate things that share an ingenious likeness. But it is the unlikeness that creates tension. Where love can be so near but definitively impossible as Dickinson’s poem 640:

In my preface, I am repeating a persistent romantic idea: in the case of my new book, ghosts pierce the silence through the elements, through seasons, hues of light, and the moods of nature.

Are there certain writers, in any genre, who you always come back to throughout your life? What is it about their writing that persistently draws you to them?

When I’m stuck, when I want to reset my mind into the lyrical mode, I find myself picking up Stevens, Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Plath, Berryman, and Lowell. I share nothing with these writers in temperament; it’s the sheer brilliance of their image making and sense of sound that puts me into the lyrical mode. Prose is much different. I don’t pick up Tolstoy or Proust or Márquez and suddenly feel like writing a paragraph. Kundera and Ondaatje do inspire me; they also make me feel like I don’t have a prayer. Influence is tricky business.

Are you sometimes aware of a central or overall truth that you want to express before sitting down to write — something central at stake? Or do certain truths reveal themselves and click into place as the writing takes shape?

The crucial test for all writing is the sense that it has a reason for being. In all three genres of imaginative writing, the raison d’être is revealed through conflict, transformation, and recognition. Perhaps the sonnet form provides a micro-blueprint. There is an initial conflict, problem, or argument presented in the first stanzas, and then we are presented with the volta, a turn in perspective, or the telling crisis. Then comes transformation of the argument or character with a sense of recognition. This is classic narrative structure. The paradox in this is that one often starts a poem or a short story without knowing what the emotional crux of the piece will be. It is an act of faith that some truth will reveal itself by stirring the inner mud of obsessions and memories.