I spoke to poet Ellen Bass over video communication about her Living Room Craft Talks, a series of self-guided pre-recorded lectures on topics such as revision, discovery, and metaphor. I was curious about her pedagogy, particularly her approach towards teaching the more spiritual aspects of poetry.
AUDREY ZHENG: Many of your Living Room Craft Talks are focused around close reading a poem and analyzing a specific technique that it presents. Do you think there’s a distinction between learning to read poetry and learning to write poetry?
ELLEN BASS: I think there’s a difference between learning to read poetry for pleasure and learning to read it as a writer. I studied literature in school, and I wrote for a long time, but I didn’t really understand how to take a poem apart and see how it works in the craft and then apply that to my own writing. In hindsight, that seems like the most obvious thing you would do, but it wasn’t obvious to me, nor is it, I think, to a lot of people. In these Living Room Craft Talks I discuss how we can close read a poem in order to identify the techniques it uses to touch us so deeply, and how we can apply those same techniques in our own writing. There is a process of discovery, of being transformed, in both reading and writing poetry, but to really start writing better and to progress beyond your inherent strengths and weaknesses, you need to learn how to study poems, to imitate them and make the moves that they are making.
AZ: Are your lectures on revision influenced by the process of discovery you just brought up?
EB: Yes, absolutely. In truth, I don’t make a strong division between writing and revision. It’s all writing and it’s all revision until the final poem. Revisioning is not just about fixing a few things, it’s really revisioning, continuing to look deeper in the poem to see what it is that it wants. Sometimes in the process of writing, the discovery comes in the first draft, although the poem may still need revision to be pulled together, to have the throughline be clear. But then there’s other poems where the discovery may not come for a long time, it may be years, days, or hours before I actually get to what that discovery really is.
AZ: I read on your Wikipedia page that from 1983-2003 you facilitated therapy workshops for people who had experienced child sexual abuse. Your philosophy on poetic discovery seems to me like it involves initiating the same sort of ‘opening up’ or ‘spiritual receptiveness’ that might be encouraged in a therapy session.
EB: Absolutely. In the groups that I did with survivors of child sexual abuse, the idea wasn’t to use writing to make a finished product. Mostly, I thought of writing as a healing tool. When you write, versus when you talk, you’re not being influenced at all by somebody’s response, even a positive one. You’re not adjusting at all, even at a micro-level, to external influences. You sort of put yourself in a trance when you write. The writing led people into very deep places, very quickly, so quickly that when people shared their writing they were astonished at how much they were able to bring into language. The process of discovery was evident in that poems guided people where they didn’t anticipate going. Mark Doty, in an essay called “Souls on Ice”, says “our metaphors go on ahead of us, they know before we do.” That idea of the metaphor going on ahead of us is something that I find to be very true in my own writing, and I might extend it even to say that the language itself goes out ahead of us. Very often I’ll make an image or I’ll make a metaphor which leads to something that I didn’t anticipate, which leads to the discovery of the poem.
AZ: You speak of poetry writing as if it’s almost an inevitable or unconscious process. It must be difficult to teach something that comes from such a spiritual place. Do you think there’s any element of poetry writing that can’t be explicitly taught but can only be known to us through some inherent receptiveness or life experience?
EB: That’s such a beautiful phrase, “inherent receptiveness”. I think if we don’t cultivate that then all the teaching in the world won’t help us make the poems we really want to make. We can be guided towards the quality of being receptive, but it’s an inside job, we have to decide that it’s important to us and then we have to practice it. The part that can be taught, which is not separate from the spiritual practice of receptiveness but is almost like a hand holding it, is learning the craft, the strategies. I can teach those strategies, and as I teach them, I am always talking about the quality of paying attention and the quality of being willing to go into the unknown, being willing to not know. Our culture praises knowing so much. I still have to work on not sounding too knowing, to cultivate that unknowing. My wife, who is an entomologist, used to work with a wonderful young man who often would say “I can’t speak to that”. And I just loved that so much. No one ever said anything like that when I was growing up.
AZ: Can you clarify how this unknowing relates to poetry? Does it have to do with receptiveness?
EB: Yes, if you already know then you can’t discover. I’ve been reading this book about babies and how they’re like little scientists, experimenting all the time and finding things out. It made me think about how scientists start from a place of not knowing, they have a hypothesis. And they do many, many trials of things before they discover something. Poetry writing is a lot like that, for me. I often make many attempts before I discover what the poem is. I think beginner poets often want to just write down an experience or an event, and have that be a successful poem. When I work with students, sometimes I say to them “this poem describes what happened. But you haven’t come to discover something that you didn’t already know before you sat down to write it. You’re writing what you already knew. Now you have to push further.”
AZ: I read that you were married to a man before discovering a romantic love for women. Listening to you talk about unknowing and discovery, of letting yourself be open to something that you haven't conceived yet, I wonder if your poetic process informed your process of romantic self-discovery.
EB: I think I had to be open to discovery, for sure. It’s interesting because, other than the relationship I had with my husband, I loved my romantic relations with men. However, they didn’t seem to be working for me as a “whole-person” because I became so interested in the lives of women. In ‘82 I was very, just fed-up, about my past marriage and I was reading a great deal of writing from lesbian writers who were talking about feminist concerns, and I was teaching women’s workshops where women were writing things about their experience that had never been published before. It’s hard to imagine now, because there’s so much writing available to us, how absolutely fresh, new, stunning this was. I’ve never heard anybody else say this, but my feeling and thinking at this moment was “I’m teaching women, I’m reading women, I’m excited about women’s lives, why am I with men? I want to be with women.” I realized that my actual nature was bisexual, which in the early 80’s was very frowned upon, though I say I’m a lesbian because I’ve been in a monogamous relationship with a woman for forty-some years.
AZ: That reminds me of how, when I was a young child growing up, I had a sense of same-sex attraction but I didn’t have a word for it, which gave me the feeling that there was a deficiency in the mundane use of language.
EB: That’s exactly what I’m talking about, that the language is deficient. Because if somebody says to me now “what is your sexual orientation?” I don’t really have an accurate answer. I mean, I’m a bisexual lesbian? And in the old days, if you said you were bisexual, people thought that meant you had to have a woman lover and man lover all the time. That you were, to some extent, polyamorous. Now that seems strange to us.
AZ: I’m really interested in how your transition from in-person instruction to online instruction went. I was in high school when the Covid pandemic hit, so I saw my teachers get really depressed when they had to teach through online modules and lose in-person engagement. I read in one of your interviews that something you really enjoy about teaching workshops is that you’re able to see your students improve and get better. I’m wondering if you’re able to experience that same process with the Living Room Craft Talks, if you’re able to get an intimate sense of connection with the people who engage in your lectures.
EB: I find giving the craft talks so exciting that it must be very different from the experience of being a high school teacher during Covid. People who came to the craft talks, especially during the early days of the pandemic when we were so isolated, were like “oh, thank goodness. At last I can forget about Covid for two hours and just get immersed in poetry-land”. I was so excited, I mean, the very first one, I was talking so fast, I was so excited, that people in chat kept having to say “slow down, slow down”.
I was so thrilled, and I am so passionate about teaching poetry. Getting questions from the Q&A and people writing in the chat made me feel really connected. People were sharing with me, sometimes by email, how they had poems get accepted and how they were learning so much. Even people who were watching the recording, because they lived in a different time-zone, would respond in some way. We were fueling each other. I found it very hard to write during the years of the pandemic, but teaching the craft talks was something that I could just throw myself into.
