Anne Stevenson
(b.1933)
Main page, here
Northern poet wins largest
literary prize
Angelique Chrisafis, arts correspondent
Thursday April 18, 2002
The Guardian
In a move that will get London writers shifting
their garrets to Sunderland, the largest literary award in Britain yesterday
went to a Durham poet, specifically for living in the north.
Anne Stevenson, 69, won the first £60,000 Northern Rock Foundation Writer Award, set up by the Newcastle-based bank for writers resident in the north-east. At three times the worth of the Booker prize, and outstripping the combined £50,000 Whitbread awards, it is the UK's biggest literary award for an individual writer.
Stevenson has published 15 volumes of poetry since 1965, with her verse described as heart-breakingly terse and "objective". A contemporary of Sylvia Plath, she published a biography of the American poet, Bitter Fame in 1989.
Stevenson grew up in the US and lived in Ireland, Scotland and the south of England before moving to Durham in 1988. She has been a Northern Arts literary fellow since the 1980s.
The poet, who will receive yearly instalments of £20,000, said: "This award comes as a confirmation or affirmation of my writing at a time when I was telling myself that I should perhaps retire from poetry."
Stevenson said the award was a tribute to the large arts scene in the north-east, which includes Booker prize-winning novelist Pat Barker, the poet and critic Sean O'Brien - twice winner of the Forward poetry prize - and the children's laureate, Anne Fine.
Stevenson said: "Only unobservant and benighted southerners who have never troubled themselves to look north of the Trent imagine that London is and will always be the only city of culture in the United Kingdom
Issue 14 November 2000
Cynthia Haven
Anne Stevenson
Anne Stevenson is decidedly
a British-American phenomenon: she was born in Cambridge, England; reared in the
States; and educated at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The U.S. citizen
returned to Britain after her bachelor's and master's degrees (she studied with
Donald Hall) and has lived, variously, in England, Scotland, and Wales in the
decades since. She is the author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as
additional books of essays and literary criticism.
The Washington Post praised the "penetrating, skeptical intelligence" of
her poetry. Peter Levi, in Britain's Poetry Review, described her "terse
brilliance," "moral wit," and "hard-bitten objectivity.... The stinging winter
sunshine in her poems is what we need and seldom find elsewhere," Levi wrote.
We met earlier this year in her home in the amazing, breathtaking city of
Durham, England. Its gray Norman citadel rises massively, magnificently out of
an outcropping of rock and green hill, blending castle and university and
cathedral into a single silhouette with the rushing Wear River at its base. This
town near the Scottish border has been the poet's home for over a decade.
For me, the visit amounted to a pilgrimage. The name "Anne Stevenson" has been a
familiar one ever since my own university days in Ann Arbor: Stevenson serves as
a sort of patron saint for literature students at the university, just as Arthur
Miller had done at the drama department. Moreover, both of us had won Avery
Hopwood awards while at the university, although Stevenson's three awards ('51,
'52, and '54) were rather an astonishment. By comparison, Miller and I were only
awarded twice.
Stevenson won praise from another alumna—The New Yorker's Janet Malcolm,
author of
Silent Woman,
the highly acclaimed study of scholarship about Plath. In that book, Malcolm
lauded Stevenson as the author of
Bitter Fame,
the controversial Plath biography.
Despite the accolades (Malcolm had said Stevenson's was "by far the most
intelligent and the only authentically satisfying" Plath biography), the book
won her scores of enemies and tended to put her own acclaimed poetry in eclipse.
A dozen years since the book's publication, Stevenson seems to take her own
bitter fame in stride.
Our interview, conducted at her home—in the small, tidy parlor, which is
dominated by a big shiny piano, fresh flowers, and a kilim carpet—was not
without difficulty. She had just returned from an overnight stay in the Lake
Country at Grassmere, where she gave a reading the night before at the
Wordsworth Museum—in fact, she hadn't even had time to change clothes.
More importantly, the poet has grown mostly deaf over the past years, a handicap
she comments upon wryly in a recent quatrain:
I've lost a sense. Why should
I care?
Searching myself, I find a spare.
I keep that sixth sense in repair
And set it deftly, like a snare.
Nevertheless, Stevenson lived up to her feisty reputation. As fellow transatlantic poet Alastair Reid noted, "She has a whim of iron."
—Cynthia Haven
Interview with Anne Stevenson
Cynthia Haven:
You've had a long career—your first book was published way back in 1965, under
the auspices of Generation at the University of Michigan. How do you
think you've changed as a poet since then?
Anne Stevenson: I suppose, over the years, I've become more conscious of what I can and what I can't do in poetry. And I hope I've learned not to think of myself as the center of the universe. It's apparently very hard for people to swallow that they aren't all that important. Don't you think it's better to open one's eyes to the objective world than to become a slave of ambition and desire? But I'm not very good at saying such things in interviews. If I could, maybe I wouldn't have to write poetry.
CH: Could you describe your daily schedule?
AS: Practically nonexistent. I used to do a great many readings and arts councilings and that sort of thing. But my husband prefers a quiet life, and I myself have found that for writing, I'm better off not scooting around too much. As a consequence, my new book, at least in my opinion, is one of my best.
CH: Your new book was published in Britain?
AS: Granny Scarecrow came out last May. It's published by Bloodaxe Books. Oxford stopped publishing poetry at the end of last year. Bloodaxe is, fortunately for me, based in Newcastle Upon Tyne, just a few miles from my home in Durham. [Ed. Note: Bloodaxe is one of the preeminent British publishers of poetry.]
CH: You attended the West Chester Poetry Conference this summer. Was that the first time you participated in a U.S. poetry conference since your move to Britain decades ago?
AS: Yes, and I had pretty cold feet about going.
CH: Why?
AS: Partly because I'm seriously deaf. But I went in company with a good young English poet, Chris McCulley. It was a deal. I was supposed to keep him from drinking alcohol. He was supposed to do my hearing for me. [Stevenson laughs]
CH: So you haven't been back much to the U.S. as a poet?
AS: Well, I gave a few readings early in June—two in Wisconsin, one in Ann Arbor, and then took part in one in West Chester. I don't much like traveling around giving readings. I sometimes wonder what people get out of listening once to poems they don't know. Even when my hearing was better, I know I missed most of what was read on such occasions. I admit I do quite enjoy "treading the boards" if the audience is sympathetic and small enough.
CH: What did you speak about at West Chester?
AS: In my "master class" I tried essentially to make a distinction between rhythm and meter. The former is a physical-cum-musical concept; the latter has to do with prosodic forms. People forget that memorable rhythms are not always metrically exact. Mainly I used examples from poems that I thought would be familiar to the students: poems from Shakespeare, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, and most of all from G.M. Hopkins, whose ideas about sprung rhythm can be shown to apply almost universally. I also drew attention to Ivor Gurney's experiments with form and rhythm, and to the elegant free verse of my friend Frances Horovitz, who, alas, died of cancer at forty in 1983. And, yes, I quoted nursery rhymes and pop songs. It's surprising how much so-called traditional poetry is not metrically exact—especially if you count stresses per line instead of feet. Once you know what a foot is in a line of poetry, it's good to get away from the straightjacket of over-strict meters. Poetry has to either sing or talk—almost naturally. Otherwise, it gets boring.
CH: Yet you've written much verse in very traditional meters…
AS: Well, I suspect there isn't really such a thing as free verse. Or if there is, I don't think I've written any. Readers may not always realize how formally constructed my poems are—but I assure you, not a single line has ever been passed over as accidental or unconsidered. Let me show you a poem that illustrates what I mean.
[Stevenson reads her poem: "Trinity at Low Tide"]
Sole to sole with your reflection
on the glassy beach,
your shadow gliding beside you,
you stride in triplicate across the sand.
Waves, withdrawn to limits on their leash,
are distant, repetitious whisperings,
while doubling you, the rippling tideland
deepens you.
Under you, transparent yet exact,
your downward ghost keeps pace-
pure image, cleansed of human overtones:
a travelling sun, your face;
your breast, a field of sparkling shells and stones.
All blame is packed into that black, featureless
third trick of light that copies you
and cancels you.
As you must have heard, there are a great many assonantal sounds there: beach,
leach, repetitious—obviously echoing words or echoing noises. "Repetitious
whispering" is onomatopoeic. "Doubling you" and "deepens you" are chiming,
rhythmic phrases. Since there are eight lines in the first stanza, all of
different lengths, the second stanza has to repeat or reflect the same number.
The poem is, among other things, about reflections. Then the "you... you...you"
noises are important as are the repeated "c's": cleansed, copies, cancels, and
the rhyming of pace and face. The effect is of rhymes running all through the
poem's wave-like rhythms. I wanted them to reproduce the sound of water lapping
against the shore.
CH: It also conveys what one critic called your "nervous echo, the insistent double, the recollecting mirror." He said: "this doubling develops into something between a persistent motif and a personal signature." But it's interesting you use terms like "echoing" and "chiming" where many would use "internal rhyme," or "alliteration."
AS: I rarely think of terms like alliteration, internal rhyme, et cetera. Either a poem sings or it doesn't. I am conscious of the line endings, yes, but I never analyze what is happening when I write. That comes later. As Elizabeth Bishop put it, it's too easy to talk the life out of poetry. My model is, anyway, music: that is, poems come to me in musical phrases or cadences. Some of my poems are probably just musical toys.
CH: So how do you begin a poem? How does a poem come to you?
AS: Sometimes a line just appears, but most of the time I see something or hear about something, or even read something that makes me sit up and say, "I'm sure there's a poem there." Once I've drafted a first stanza—the one, say, in the poem I just read—I usually decide to carry through the pattern it sets up. I don't know how long the poem's going to be, of course. Sometimes I don't even know what the poem is going to be about. But by the time I've worked my way around a few drafts—it usually takes me, oh, I would say twelve to fifteen drafts to write a short poem like "Trinity at Low Tide"—and by the time I've found a rhythm that seems right, and I've got an idea running smoothly through it, then the poem sort of comes together of its own accord. The process is not unlike solving a crossword puzzle. No, not really the same, because most of what happens is unconscious, and most of the time you work on a poem—say, for a couple of days, very hard—getting nowhere with it, or losing the thread completely...and then, you wake up one morning and the whole thing works!
So writing a poem is like conducting an argument between your unconscious mind and your conscious self. You have to get unconsciousness and consciousness lined up in some way. I suspect that's why working to a form, achieving a stanza, and keeping to it—deciding that the first and third and fifth lines will have to rhyme, and that you're going to insist on so many stresses per line—oddly helps the poem to be born. That is, to free itself from you and your attentions to it and become a piece of art in itself. Heaven only knows where it comes from! I suppose working out a form diminishes the thousands of possibilities you face when you begin. And once you've cut down the possibilities, you can't swim off into the deep and drown. Well, it's a very, very strange process.
CH: How did you begin writing poetry?
AS: I suppose my father read lots of it to us. And I have always loved ballads and songs. Those are what I wrote as a child, you know—ballads and songs. I knew a great many by heart, though I couldn't recite them now. And when I got to high school, I had very good English teaching, and I spent my summers writing poems and practicing the piano and cello. At the time, I wanted to be a musician. My father was a good amateur pianist.
CH: And you began as a musician, didn't you?
AS: Well, in my teens and for two years at Michigan, I studied the piano and the cello, but I was never very good. My hearing is so bad now I don't try to play the cello, but I can still hear enough to enjoy my piano. Music and poetry developed together for me, and despite my deafness, I still believe that music is the finest of the arts.
But maybe something else goes into making a poet: you could call it a resistant discontent with the given thing. I've never been a quick learner, and in grade school my teachers thought I was slow, even stupid. One problem may have been, even then, unreliable hearing. And not being able to hear may have made me the kind of person who has to think about everything hard before taking it onboard. Being slow to understand can be an advantage, and perhaps I learned at an early age how to make the baffling world make sense.
CH: Music is very much evident in your poetry—in its composition and sounds, even its subject matter. I am particularly fond of "Kosovo Surprised by Mozart" which appeared in Britain's PN Review earlier this year and later in Granny Scarecrow. Can you describe its origins?
AS: "Kosovo Surprised by Mozart" was written, as the title indicates, in April, 1999, the day after I had listened to Bernard Roberts in Harlech play K 533 in F Major. Roberts gave a series of recitals that spring centered on classical—18th, early-19th century—piano music at a time when the horrors of Serbia's invasion of Kosovo were, in Britain, nightly "entertainment" on the television. The elegance of Mozart's music has always struck me as a true artist's response to squalor, evil, and human folly. One doesn't wallow in violence and cruelty, one rises above it! Very unfashionable point of view today but, nevertheless, mine. Out of Mozart's short, sad, in many ways squalid life, arose all that magnificent music; it survives still, bringing to those who can hear it great joy today, though Mozart the man was buried more than 200 years ago in a pauper's grave.
The horrors of Kosovo on the television were symptomatic of humanity's willingness to inflict, record, and accept misery. It's easier to wallow in a cinematic hell—there before you on the screen at the flick of a switch—than to listen and understand the passionate compassion Mozart imparts through those "inky dots," but, really, nothing is more boring than sustained violence, nothing more degrading to the spirit, which is why, to a few, Mozart's music is like a redemption, despite the continuing defeat of the beautiful and good in a world, past and present, of terrible yet ephemeral events.
The theme of "Kosovo Surprised by Mozart" is that of "The Miracle of Camp 60"—a poem about the chapel built by Italian prisoners of war in Orkney during World War II. Art of any kind, if it really is art, moves us towards sympathy, understanding, and a release of the spirit, just as Aristotle taught in the 4th century B.C., and as W.H. Auden and Wallace Stevens, with their very different beliefs, taught in the 20th century A.D.
CH: The Dictionary of Literary Biography said you have "a fine sense of the complicated differences between American and British poetry, and [embody] the traditions of both in a poetry that achieves definition because of its allegiances, and distinction because of its intense and relentless individuality."
AS: Who said that?
CH: J.E. Chamberlin of the University of Toronto.
AS: Indeed. Well, that's quite good—a bit academic.
CH: How do you combine those sensibilities? And how do you see the differences?
AS: That's not for me to say. That's for somebody else. I think I'm vain enough to believe that if anyone took time to study my poetry, they might find quite a number of things to say about...well, the kind of things I say.
CH: Do you see an affinity between your native Michigan and the north of England where you live now?
AS: Probably. The south of England, Oxford and Cambridge, are a bit like Harvard and Yale, aren't they? That ever-present, coolly assumed superiority. I'm sure I'd rather live in an environment where there aren't quite so many tropical fish, as it were, crowding the fishbowl, mostly bent on eating each other. I don't thrive in a community of egos. Not at all. I feel the Midwestern part of me is the healthiest part—you know, feet on the ground, common sense. But I need a lot of space, too, in which to think. I need to read a lot. I don't just mean reading poetry, but reading novels and books on science and history, lots of biography. I wonder how poets ever have time to read enough when they're flying all over the world giving readings.
CH: It's good to have time for mulling.
AS: Mulling, yes. You have to mull a lot. You have to be in touch with yourself, with your deeper self, to write poetry. Having to project yourself, as I do at readings, cheats me from being in touch with the self that writes the poems. There's one of me that's a "projector"—an actress, if you like—but the me that writes poems is a more difficult person. If I give too many readings, or even see too many people, I find myself behaving in ways that I fancy might please them. Afterwards, I feel rather dirty and nasty, as if I'd betrayed somebody behind her back.
CH: Maybe that's what ate Sylvia Plath.
AS: Sylvia Plath felt the same. I know she did.
Her journals analyze her social discomforts again and again. It's clear she found people exhausting, but she needed to impress them, too. Then, when she got to Devon and there weren't any people she much cared to impress, she became depressed and miserable. I don't think that's so surprising, mind you. Probably for Plath, as for me, poetry was the only language through which she could approach her emotional truth. Alas, the truths in her case were so devastating they killed her.
CH: Did you know Jane Kenyon? Of course you must have. She grew up in Ann Arbor, too.
AS: I knew who she was.
CH: But she was married to Donald Hall. Didn't your paths cross?
AS: Donald Hall was married to somebody else when I was in Ann Arbor. Jane was a little younger than I was.
CH: Tell me a little bit about your connection with Donald Hall. He encouraged you to write your first book about Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop (Twayne, 1966).
AS: Yes. He introduced me to poetry, really. I owe Donald Hall a great deal. I took his course in contemporary American poets. He was intelligent, inspiring, a fine teacher.
CH: At the University of Michigan?
AS: Yes. I was a graduate student. It must have been 1960, 1961.
CH: One thing Sylvia Plath, you, and I have in common is that we all left university, moved to England, and married Englishmen.
AS: There's lots else we have in common. [Stevenson chuckles.]
CH: Yes. But of the three of us, I was the only one who went back. Why did you first move to England?
AS: I was born in England. I was born in Cambridge.
CH: I thought you were born in Ann Arbor.
AS: No. I was born in Cambridge, England, where my father [Charles Leslie Stevenson] went to study philosophy with [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore, among others, after he'd taken a first degree at Yale. I was born in Cambridge, in January, 1933. That's why I was in such a hurry to get back to Cambridge after I'd graduated from Michigan.
CH: And your first husband was from Cambridge, yes?
AS: During the war, my family adopted two English girls from Cambridge as part of an Anglo-American university scheme to send the children of English dons to the States—to escape the bombing and the Nazis' very possible invasion. Robin, my first husband, was the younger brother of these girls. He must have been nine at the time (I was seven), and he lived with a banker's family just up the street. Much later, when we were both at university—he was at Cambridge and I was a senior at Michigan—we met again one summer and decided it would be nice to seal the family bond. So I came to England, actually, to marry Robin Hitchcock. The marriage was not a great success, but we have an awfully nice daughter and two lovely grandchildren to share between us. We're still on good terms.
Robin was utterly unlike Ted Hughes; they had almost nothing in common, but there was a curious connection. Robin was the son of the Queen's College rector who had died during the war. His widow, through the kindness of the new incumbent, was invited to stay on in the rectory and support herself by taking in lodgers. Ted Hughes's best friend, Lucas Myers, happened to be one of the lodgers. Luke tells the story of Ted's nights in the St. Botolph's chicken coop in his appendix to Bitter Fame, but even though Ted was around now and again, I never met Sylvia Plath. We were nearly the same age, but by 1955, the year Sylvia came to study at Cambridge, I was already married and living in London.
CH: Why do you think people are still fascinated by the Plath legend? With the release of the unabridged journals this year, we can see it is still pretty much a national obsession—still, after forty years, on both sides of the ocean.
AS: Don't ask me. Maybe because everybody loves a romance. Why do they still get excited about the woes of Tristan and Isolde? The Hughes-Plath story is another desperately tragic tale. It will probably never disappear from 20th-century mythology.
CH: In a recent San Jose Mercury article, I argued that the frenzy seems to arise from very different national ideologies, and very divergent attitudes about personal responsibility, psychological health, and human relationships.
AS: You think so?
CH: Coarsely put, the English attitude seems to be that Plath needed to take responsibility for pulling herself together and be "a good wife."
AS: Well, she was a good wife. Maybe too good. Oh, it's very complicated. I think I've told the story as well as I can in Bitter Fame. Put coarsely, Sylvia was completely unable to accept failure. If her marriage failed—that was it, forever.
I've read an interesting article recently by a psychiatrist who puts a great deal of responsibility on the shoulders of Ruth Beuscher, Sylvia's therapist. Ruth Beuscher, who later became a pastoral psychologist in the Church, was young and inexperienced when Plath first met her. It was Beuscher who persuaded Sylvia to have electrical shock treatment the second time, and, of course, that shock treatment became a central trauma to Sylvia later on. In Boston, Beuscher gave Sylvia "permission to hate" her mother—rather extreme, don't you think, to give an impressionable girl permission to "hate" her mother, even though this particular mother, by doing right may actually have perpetrated wrong? A more mature psychiatrist would have realized that the hatred of a mother and the love of the father aren't so simple as the Electra complex formula would have them be. Sylvia clearly took everything Ruth Beuscher told her to heart. Finally, when Ted Hughes was having an affair, and Sylvia got wind of it in Devon—it wasn't much of an affair; I don't excuse Ted, but you can see why he might have made a bid for liberty just then—it was Beuscher again who advised her to break with Ted immediately. Don't try to patch it up, Beuscher almost ordered. She'd been through a divorce experience herself, and she knew that, once caught straying, a husband could never be trusted to be faithful again, so Sylvia set up on her own.
CH: You're taking a very English point of view. You patch things up. You make do.
AS: No. I'm not taking an English point of view. Heavens, I've been through three divorces, but I do think what you need when a marriage is going wrong is a trial separation. You don't just jump into divorce right away. If you're a psychiatrist advising someone, you try to help them put it together, especially since it was such a close marriage, a marriage of two souls—two children to think of, too. No, I don't think mine is an English point of view. It's just common sense.
CH: Yes. The English are very big on common sense.
AS: Well, maybe. But whatever it was, it was an unhappy situation for Sylvia.
CH: American thinking is much more final, much more all-or-nothing. He broke a commitment, a bond—that's the beginning and end of it.
AS: Yes. They divorce at the drop of a hat.
CH: Exactly.
AS: [Laughter]
CH: It's funny—I can describe the points of view on both sides of the Atlantic, but I feel like I'm somehow welded into one side of the debate; it's part of my hardware. I wonder if the ferocity and rancor of the debate is because Sylvia Plath is so American.
AS: She was American.
CH: Her ambition, her drive, her determination to have everything perfect—it's so Emersonian.
AS: Yes, yes, yes.
CH: She's the daughter of America—she's Daisy Miller.
AS: Yes, yes, yes.
CH: So when we see her go down—all of us are going down, with her.
AS: But I will say this about Sylvia Plath: she always tucked that pocket of air between herself and her poems. Her poems are powerful because she was essentially an artist before she was a woman or an American or anything else. When she wrote, she had this wonderful hard-headed objectivity. It was when she wasn't writing that she betrayed herself. But we can agree with Olwyn Hughes [Ted's sister and Plath's longtime literary executor] that as an artist, she's unassailable. That's why her poems are so powerful; they are much more, very much more, than self-expression. They express the agony of betrayal as well as any poems I've ever read. They are wonderful, but the gap between the girl and the artist was enormous. To me, her talent was so much bigger than her personality, it must have been very difficult to carry all this power of language and yet, in the end, realize it couldn't save her.
CH: In a sense, what was American in her destroyed her.
AS: Yes, destroyed her. Yes. Her ambition destroyed her, in a way.
CH: That New England perfectionism.
AS: Yes. I remember that. Once, at Michigan, I got a "D" in a history exam and was nearly on the point of dropping out of college altogether. You would have thought the world had come to an end.
Perhaps one reason I agreed to write Bitter Fame had to do with Sylvia's Americanness. I felt I knew her in a way Ted didn't. So when Olwyn Hughes began bitching about Sylvia, telling me how absurd she was and how she expected Ted to do this and expected Ted to do that and completely ruled the household, I said, "That's just the way Americans are." [Laughter.]
Well, possibly, England was a disease Sylvia suffered from. I did, too, but I was more cowed by it. And then I got out of one English marriage and went straight into another! I suppose over the years I've learned to take myself less seriously. Surely, part of the skill of survival is to laugh at yourself, to realize you've made mistakes, that everybody makes mistakes. What the Hell!
CH: Certainly your book was colored by the tone of its appendices. Dido Merwin's is so venomous…
AS: Yes.
CH: And Lucas Myers' is so anti-American.
AS: No, I don't think he was, really.
CH: Oh, he says some pretty offensive things.
AS: Yes, maybe he was trying to be more English than the English.
CH: T.S. Eliot had already won that prize. But I think those accounts gave Bitter Fame a flavor. It gave an inevitability to Sylvia Plath's story—she does seem a sort of Daisy Miller through it all. Even Hughes's Birthday Letters reveals a remarkable amount of national stereotyping: "You were a new world. My new world. So this is America," "long, perfect American legs," "your exaggerated American grin," "an American girl, being so American." One wonders: Did he see her?
AS: Of course, he wasn't in any way a stereotype of southern England. He was very, very much a product of Yorkshire, and that's another complication. I've always had the highest respect for Ted as a poet and a man because he never kowtowed to the establishment. He didn't become an academic; he wasn't ambitious, except to write poetry; he wasn't ambitious for position. I think he was pleased to be asked to be poet laureate, but he wasn't working at it. He certainly didn't work at literary politics at all; he had nothing to do with that; he was horrified by it. And I'd have to say Sylvia, too, was of a mind with Ted. They both were dedicated—seriously dedicated—artists, but, of course, their very dedication and their lack of self-knowledge... I don't think Ted knew himself at all in those early days, and Sylvia seems to have absorbed advice from everybody: from Ted, from Ruth Beuscher as a young child, from her mother, so it was awfully hard for her to find herself, and I think she did have a—how do you put it now? A weak sense of identity? I did, too, when I came to England. So you go to everybody for advice and take it from everybody you respect, and then they betray you. How very Henry James. It is Henry James. It struck me right away that Sylvia's was a Jamesian story.
CH: You wrote three poems for Sylvia Plath. Were they written at the time you were writing the biography?
AS: Yes. Yes.
CH: So those poems are your own say?
AS: That was my own say. I think they more or less say what I had to say.
CH: They're wonderful.
AS: Hmmm?
CH: I think they're marvelous.
AS: You do? I'm glad. I thought at West Chester, maybe, I should read the long one. I didn't, finally.
CH: The one where you call Plath "the pure gold honey bee" and "the fiercest poet of our time"? That's too bad!
AS: I don't know. Oh dear, every time I think about Sylvia Plath I groan. I'm so tired of the whole saga!
CH: I'll bet you are. It will all be coming out again with the new journals, the revelations from Emory University [where Hughes's papers are archived], and with the biographies of Ted Hughes, by Elaine Feinstein and Diane Middlebrook.
AS: They're welcome to do what they do. I'll never write another biography about a living person.
CH: And yet, you yourself have written: "Writing a biography of Sylvia Plath convinced me that poetry today is at a turning point. Nostalgic wistfulness, individual self-pity, political idealism, angst, fury, vindictiveness, all the emotional magnets of the Romantics, are, in the last analysis, fictions. They have been replaced in poetry, in the twentieth century, chiefly by abstract experiment with language, which, of course, is starvation fare for poets." So where is the balance between subjectivity and objectivity?
AS: One has to maintain a distance, an air pocket between the poet and the poem—a pocket of objectivity. The poem isn't an expression of what you could say better in ordinary language, or in theoretical language.
CH: Do you think the imbalance has resulted in too little technique—too much self-expression—in poetry?
AS: That's right.
CH: In your rather crusty on-line response to Poetry Society of America's "What's American About American Poetry?"—a questionnaire sent to 300 American poets—you said there was "Too much talk, too much hype, too much putative democracy, too much ignorance, too much self-indulgence, too much encouragement, too much follow-the-leader conformism, too much self-consciousness, too much seek-to-establish-your-identity, too much theory of language, too much academic anxiety, too many writing programmes, too many king-and-queen-making critics, too many competitions (mediocrity assiduously crowning mediocrity); enfin, too many poets."
Would you care to elaborate?
AS: Too often when I read new poetry, English or American, it all sounds alike. There are few individual voices. And the poems tend to be one- or two-dimensional, ignoring subtleties and nuances. Plop, plop, plop—in the indicative mood, allowing for few shadings or innuendoes. You don't have to say everything you mean in a poem. In America, especially, there is too much earnestness around and very little word play. Get the words right, and the earnestness will take care of itself.
Nowadays, of course, "creativity" is a fashionable word. I once heard Hugh McDiarmid say outright, "Don't encourage them; discourage them." I tend to agree. I sometimes wonder if workshops actually do much good. Everybody's so afraid of hurting each other's feelings. Good criticism means you have to hurt people's feelings. Poetry isn't just a matter of learning technical tricks. Since most of the poetry people bring into workshops is personal and sloppy, applying "group technique" to it encourages a negative approach. I mean, you learn primarily what not to do: not to overuse adjectives, not to fall back on cliches, not to be sentimental, and so on. Unfortunately, this communal process of cleaning poems up and polishing them for publication results too often in just what you'd expect: processed poetry that lacks individuality and passion, or as Frost put it, "That Wildness whereof it is made."
And then, the social categorization so ubiquitous today is destructive: women, race, class, age groups. Elizabeth Bishop remarked to me once that if you don't stay well away from the gray world of ideology and theory, you will never become a poet. Emily Dickinson—not a bad thinker, you'll agree?—developed her ideas through an acute awareness of what was around her in the world, whether it was a fly or a flower.
CH: Why do you think there are there so many poets today?
AS: Because they are given jobs—academic jobs in creative writing! I admire Dana Gioia in the way I admire Wallace Stevens because I, too, believe that if you're good at writing poems, that's something you do for love. As Frost wrote, poetry is both a vocation and an avocation. Dana, I realize, does lots of organizing and journalism to make a living, but he began as a businessman-amateur. You should say somewhere in the course of this interview that, in my view, Dana has done a great deal for poetry in America by single-handedly taking meretricious power-seeking by the scruff of the neck and shaking it, and, boy, did it need shaking! Perhaps now, though, he should think about quitting the battlefield for a while and go back to his plough. That's one trouble with the American way of success—you get going on one of these high-flying swings and you can't jump off. It's amazing to me: I never would have been able to maintain the kind of schedule Dana does. Here I am, exhausted today after a single reading in Grassmere last night.
You're going to have a hell of a job putting this interview together. But I hope you're at least making some sense out of my mutterings.
[Stevenson goes to a bookshelf, gets a copy of 1998's Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop.] You know, I think this book is better—at least it means more to me—than Bitter Fame. As you know, I was impressed and influenced by Elizabeth Bishop far more than I was by Sylvia Plath. Goodness, Bitter Fame was a struggle! After writing it, I became disillusioned with the so-called poetry scene both in England and in the States—so much commercial betting and marketing goes into it, so much taking up with this poets' group or that.
CH: You have decried "poetry's decline in the greater, sacred world of what matters."
AS: In the long run, I suppose one has to say that, these days, poetry isn't important to most people. Then you see that it actually is important, but to comparatively few. First you have to understand how little—materially—it matters. Like any art, the real stuff comes about through our human confrontation or quarrel with ourselves as Yeats said, but in later life, serious poets have to find and explore that "sacred world of what matters" pretty much for themselves.
CH: Poetic form has become such an important issue in the last fifteen years…
AS: Oh, I'm glad of that, because frankly, poets of late have been getting away with—if not murder, then surely verbal mayhem. Visual artists, too, over the last three decades have been getting huge prizes for producing nonsense. When the theory is there to be seen, the art usually isn't. It's no secret that "The Emperors New Clothes" has become the prevailing myth of the age.
CH: In Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop, you note a letter you received from Elizabeth Bishop in 1964. In your words, "she quoted Gibbon on the decay of letters in imperial Rome, acidly implying that, in New York, the literary pundits of the twentieth-century had fallen to a comparable low: 'A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.'" You imply, there and elsewhere, that things have not improved.
AS: No, not improved.
CH: What would it take to alleviate your pessimism?
AS: I suppose...oh, I don't know. I'm a Democrat politically, of course. I have a strong, liberal sense of what is due to people as individuals, but I do believe that writing poetry is not something everybody needs to indulge in. Encouraging more and more people to express themselves and, above all, to publish poems or put them on the internet, does tend to thin the blood—of literature, I mean. People forget how to read. They forget that you need to develop a strong degree of attention to read intelligently the poetry of, say, Auden or Yeats, or even Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop. You need to be sensitive to all the sounds, rhythms, echoes, et cetera, that constitute a poem to know what's going on in it. If nothing is going on except the promulgation of some one-dimensional idea or personal experience, if the so-called poem is nothing but a cut-up piece of not-very-interesting prose, then it isn't poetry at all. It's not asking anything of the reader, except perhaps fellow-feeling or sympathy.
On the other hand, it seems to me that poetry shouldn't be an elitist art: that it should, in some way, appeal to the culture it reflects. The trouble is that our culture is so degenerate now—think of the garish, vacuous nature of most television shows—that it easily breeds degenerate poetry. Through television, language has become a thing of grunts, clichés, and sound bytes. People are not encouraged to concentrate. My grandchildren have a hard time in this respect. Anyway, all these factors reinforce each other: poor concentration, lack of knowledge, and an immense amount of technology that enables you to communicate much more quickly and gives you much less time to think about what you do communicate. Sometimes I get the feeling that thought, consideration, understanding—accumulated wisdom—might disappear altogether, so I'm pessimistic. I'm afraid I don't think we're living in a good time for poetry. Much of it isn't art at all, has nothing to do with art. Instead, it has to do with the politics of getting on—with fame, jobs, money, life-style. Poetry ought to stand apart from all of that. It ought to constitute a critique of all of that.
CH: And yet there has been much talk of a poetry renaissance in the U.S. Do you think that it's simply that the bar has been lowered?
AS: That's right. Lowering the bar. Exactly! Set it so low you can step over it—easy! I like your expression, "lowering the bar." Pretty soon there'll be no bar at all, and that's interesting, you know, because Americans are so demanding of themselves in other fields. In sports, you have to be almost super-humanly good to get anywhere these days. And musicians today have to have very, very high standards of performance. But so far as creativity goes, we've hit rock bottom—in some places, it's become no more than a form of therapy. Please understand that I have nothing against therapy—but if you encourage people to write purely for the good it may do their psyches, you shouldn't expect automatically to discover poets. Oh, yes, luck could turn up another John Clare or David Gascoyne or Ivor Gurney, but mostly...no.
CH: You've been poet-in-residence at a number of universities. Didn't you teach creative writing on occasion?
AS: Yes, of course. But I thought of myself rather modestly as someone who could advise less-experienced writers—a sort of poetry coach. I mostly worked with individuals, and much of my advice had to do with what to read or with poetry that might help guide them. These days poetry courses are expected to produce prize-winning pupils and a blaze of creative glory all around. I don't think I could bring myself to teach creative writing again. I do, of course, correspond with a few—trusted!—poets. We exchange critiques and so forth, but friendships between like-thinking writers has been common since poetry began. It's the commercial aspect of the creative writing craze—teaching people to write for money—that puts me off entirely.
CH: Why?
AS: Because it isn't really a subject. I would happily teach composition, grammar, sentence structure, other languages (if I knew enough), philosophy, English literature, world literature, even journalism, but not—not creative writing. Did Byron or Shakespeare, for that matter, ever dream of enrolling in classes in creativity? Did Auden or Frost? Consciously trying to teach people to be poets is, in some way I can't really put my finger on, destructive. The Muse, I suppose, really isn't all that nice! She hates rules, hates conformity, favors her special pets, gleefully drives worshippers to drink or drugs, happily drives other worshippers to suicide, is politically completely unreliable, and, being an unmitigated snob, she takes flight as soon as she hears the word "creativity." Goodness, how she detests the word and makes fun of it over drinks with her cronies!
CH: Do you have any advice for young poets today?
AS: Study the poetry of all times carefully, but on your own or with chosen friends. Also study history. Study science. Study philosophy or psychology if you must. Study languages and the way they work. Study literature. But above all, learn to teach yourself. Follow your own nose and keep well away from the traps set by most university courses in literary theory—and in bogus creativity.
Cynthia L. Haven
, a literary critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, has written about poets and poetry for newspapers and magazines throughout the U.S., including the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Stanford Magazine, and The San Jose Mercury. She has written two books on education, and has published essays, poetry and translations.
Border
crossings
Anne Stevenson, the daughter of a philosopher, hoped to be
a musician but switched to literature at college. In Oxford she wrote a saga
about a New England family, but her poetry was overshadowed by her controversial
biography of Sylvia Plath. Married four times, she is now settled in Durham, and
makes a rare public appearance next week
Alfred Hickling
Saturday October 2, 2004
The Guardian
To arrive at a true understanding of Anne Stevenson's poetry, you have to go deep. In fact, the Deep is a very good place to start. Jutting into the Humber estuary like a vast steel fin, the Deep is Hull's impressive new aquatic attraction - where you expect to find tropical fish rather than topical poetry - yet the first thing the visitor sees, before descending to the bottom of Europe's deepest tank, is a line by Stevenson: "The sea is as near as we come to another world."
It is from "North Sea Off Carnoustie", though there is something about the poet herself that also belongs to another world. Stevenson lives at the top of one of the steepest hills in Durham, and does much of her writing in north Wales, but her work and demeanour speak strongly of her New England origins. One can sense the puritan influence in the poems, which are as meticulously crafted as pieces of Shaker furniture. One can sense it in her conversation, which is forthright, economical and even-handed, and even see it in her haircut, unchanged from adolescence.
"She has a candour and assurance about her that I think is purely American," says the poet and novelist Helen Dunmore. "There's a clarity about the way she talks, even the way she looks, that is quintessentially New England." Poet laureate Andrew Motion, a friend and admirer of Stevenson since the early 1970s, places her in "the lineage of puritan women poets that extends from Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath"; while the American poet, novelist and critic Jay Parini thinks of her "as a contemporary Emily Dickinson, a poet who works on a small canvas, quietly, with big themes".
The story of how a major American poet came to settle, almost unnoticed, in the north-east of England is convoluted, involving four marriages, 15 volumes of poetry and many Atlantic crossings. For those unfamiliar with her poems, she is perhaps best known as author of Bitter Fame, the acclaimed biography of her contemporary, Plath. Her latest volume, A Report From the Border (2003), brought the first major prize of her career, the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award, at 70. "Looking back at it now," she says, "any objective account of my life is bound to read like a cross between The Wife of Bath's Tale and a travel brochure." An edition of her Collected Poems , that will include 20 new ones, is planned for next year, and she is working too on a long poem based on Piers Plowman and "the rhythms of medieval lyrics. "Peter Redgrove, whose poetry I admire, is its central character, a kind of Virgil who, in a dream, leads me into an underworld of former poets."
In poetry circles, Stevenson has never wanted for admirers. A celebratory volume, published in honour of her 70th year, attracted tributes from virtually every leading figure of the poetry establishment, yet her talent has often been eclipsed. She would be the most notable literary alumnus of the University of Michigan, were it not for Arthur Miller; the foremost American woman poet of her generation, were it not for Plath. Today she might enjoy a far greater profile among the poetry-reading public were it not for her indifference to self-promotion on the literary circuit. "I've cancelled all my subscriptions to poetry magazines," she says. "I prefer to read the New Scientist. My trouble is that I don't relate very well to today's popular idea of what a poet should be. I never wanted to be a pop star." She has agreed to take part in a round-table event in Newcastle on National Poetry Day next Thursday ("it would seem curmudgeonly not to"), but says: "I truly hate marketing promotions, and I don't at all approve of encouraging wannabe poets to write bad poetry."
"It mystifies me when a poet of Anne Stevenson's stature seems to be marginalised," says Neil Astley, her publisher at Bloodaxe, "but it also speaks of her artistic independence, her individuality, and her refusal to play along with the system." Dunmore agrees: "She was a major role model for women poets of my generation, and it frustrates me that she is not better known."
Stevenson's self-imposed exile is only partly explained by her ambivalence towards the world of workshops and competitions. She has suffered acute, progressive hearing loss, which makes her increasingly uncomfortable in large groups, though her response to her disability has been typically pragmatic. She summed up the experience in a pithy, four-line poem, "On Going Deaf":
I've lost a sense. Why should I care?
Searching myself, I find a spare.
I keep that sixth sense in repair
And set it deftly, like a snare.
"It is a particularly cruel irony that someone like Anne should be afflicted with hearing loss," says Dunmore, "because her distinct quality as a poet is her remarkable ear." The poet and critic John Lucas points to the musicality of Stevenson's work: "Her cadences are almost entirely musical - even the pauses are like rests within a bar rather than punctuation within a sentence." Stevenson says that "almost always it is some overheard musical rhythm or phrase which sets me writing", and, until her late teens, she assumed that she was destined to be a musician rather than a poet.
"Every house I can remember living in had two pianos and no furniture," she says. "I can't recall my father ever entering the house without immediately sitting down to the piano. We always played chamber music as a family. My sister and I knew every Beethoven sonata note for note." A rousing glimpse of this hectic, musical household is contained in "Arioso Dolente":
Father, who ran downstairs as I practised the piano;
barefooted, buttoning his shirt, he shouted "G,
D-natural, C-flat! Dolente, arioso.
Put all the griefs of the world in that change of key."
As a musician, Charles Stevenson remained no more than a talented amateur. He built his career around his other great passion, philosophy. "Steve", as he was known, met Stevenson's mother, Louise Destler, at high school in Cincinnati. They married in 1930, after he graduated from Yale and she from Wooster College, Ohio, where her mother had been one of the first American women to go to college. Almost immediately they set sail for Cambridge, England, where Steve studied with Wittgenstein and GE Moore, whose demolition of German metaphysics had a deep impact on him, though he was less impressed with Wittgenstein's method of lecturing from a deckchair in a darkened room. In a house on Midsummer Common, on January 3 1933, Anne was born; barely six months later her father enrolled at Harvard graduate school and the family set sail for the other Cambridge, establishing the pattern of shuttling across the Atlantic that Stevenson was to follow for the rest of her life.
She spent her first six years in Boston, until the family (including a sister, Diana, two years her junior) moved again to New Haven, where Steve took up a lecturing position at Yale. Stevenson recalls that, even from an early age, having a philosopher for a father was a special distinction: "On my first day at school in New Haven," she says, "we were all asked what our fathers did for a living. All the other children said 'policeman', 'businessman', 'lawyer' and so forth. I said: 'philosopher'. My class instructor looked a bit taken aback, and asked if I meant that he was a teacher. So I puffed myself up and said: 'No - he's a heterologician'."
In 1944, her father published Ethics and Language, whose principal argument - that everything we believe is conditioned by language - was not lost on the future poet. Though now acknowledged as a landmark, the book prompted his dismissal from the philosophy faculty at Yale. "He refused to acknowledge the existence of absolute evil," explains Stevenson. "It was not a popular position during the war with Hitler."
While Steve cut a somewhat abstracted figure - Stevenson recalls that he would float off from the dinner table "into a fond, philosophical problem" - her mother was more down-to-earth. In "Arioso Dolente", Stevenson pays tribute to: "Mother, who read and thought and poured herself into me; / she was the jug and I was the two-eared cup."
"I grew up in a family of extremely strong women," Stevenson says. "They may not have been accorded much status in society, but in the home they were dominant. My mother was an extremely creative woman - she wrote novels that she never published - but ultimately she diverted all her creative energies into the work of art she was determined to make of her family.
"My mother always read to us - Dickens, Dumas, Scott, Hugo - and I believed in them so intensely that by the time I went to school I had little idea where make-believe ended and real life began."
In the elaborate fantasy world that Stevenson began to fashion for herself, there was no question she should become anything other than a famous musician. She took piano lessons from a former pupil of Prokofiev, and made elaborate plans for her discovery: "I was so determined to be seen as a second Mozart or Schubert that I hatched a plan to leave a basement window of the local church open after Brownies, so that I could slip in at dead of night and be discovered improvising at the keyboard. I really did sneak in in my nightclothes, with a candle. In the end it was probably just as well that the organ loft was locked."
In 1946, the family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the same year that a third daughter, Laura, was born. Steve took up an associate professorship at the University of Michigan, while Anne attended the university high school. It was here, in10th grade, that she wrote her first real poem: "Just a few lines which suddenly came to me after I spotted the flash of a red-winged blackbird by one of Michigan's small lakes. Real poems have mostly arrived unbidden like this ever since: caught in the corner of my eye like that bird."
It was significant that these first stirrings of poetry should be felt at the time her musical ambitions were about to collapse. In 1950, she enrolled in the music school of the University of Michigan, majoring in the cello. "It was a huge disappointment to discover that I really wasn't very good. I could have stuck it out, and practised eight hours a day, but I withdrew as I could not settle for being no more than mediocre." She switched to European history and literature, and intensified her determination to write. "Auden wanted to be an engineer when it was clear he was really a poet who thought about engineering," she says. "It became apparent I was really a poet who thought about music."
At 20, she decided she had "had enough of being a Stevenson daughter", and began looking for potential partners. Her search coincided with the reappearance of Robin Hitchcock, an Englishman who had lived with the family in New Haven as an evacuee during the second world war. Meeting again as young adults appealed to her sense of narrative. "I felt like I was living in a story," she says, though the plot was soon to develop, "if not into tragedy exactly, then certainly a mess."
On graduating from Michigan, she flew to England to begin her new life with her husband in Cambridge. She found the country "cold and shabby and tired after the war. People didn't particularly take to you if you were American and supposedly had all these advantages." More problematic was the fact that the newlyweds rapidly realised they were incompatible: "I was an aesthete, an intellectual and, as I can see now, the protected, much-hovered-over elder daughter of highly protective parents. Robin was a businessman, a risk-taker, especially with money. I was very attracted by that. But ultimately he had no interest in the arts whatsoever."
She discovered domestic life to be stifling and, particularly after her daughter Caroline was born, she had increasingly little time to write. "I hit rock bottom," she says, "skeletally thin, unable to eat or read, constantly tearful." The great irony was that as she stumbled into a creative block, great poetic events were unfolding in her mother-in-law's kitchen. Helen Hitchcock was a widowed vicar's wife who, to make ends meet, packed bohemian students into every available corner of her home, St Botolph's Rectory. A young Tennesseean, Lucas Myers, lived in the former chicken shed at the bottom of the garden, and occasionally provided shelter for his friend, Ted Hughes. In 1956, Myers, Hughes and others published a literary magazine, and named it the St Botolph's Review. It was at its launch party that Hughes met Plath.
Stevenson felt the extreme frustration of realising a poetic revolution was taking place without her. "Robin disapproved. He used to shepherd me away from the 'roistering poets', as he called them. I lacked the courage and the self-confidence to argue. But I thought: 'what if I want to be a roistering poet myself?'" She could sense an alarming pattern developing. Her mother had suppressed her creative ambitions to bring up a family, and Stevenson was determined not to make the same sacrifice. Her response was to flee, with her daughter, to Ireland, where she took refuge with a friend of her mother's in County Clare.
"Luba Kaftanikoff was a round little spinster, half-poet, half-white witch, who had known Yeats. She took me for a drive to see Lady Gregory's former home in Coole Park. This was where I met a white donkey and became convinced that it embodied the soul of Yeats. We communed for a while, and I came away determined that I should cut away from any life that precluded the writing of poetry."
She divorced Robin and returned to America, enrolling as a graduate student in English at the University of Michigan. Here she fell under the influence of the poet and teacher Donald Hall, who restored her damaged sense of confidence in herself as a person and as a poet. Yet, with a strange sense of circularity, the next person she fell in love with was an Englishman and a friend of the family, the brilliant sinologist, Mark Elvin. They married, had two sons (John, born 1966 and Charles born 1967) and moved to Britain, where Elvin held teaching posts in Cambridge, Glasgow and Oxford. Stevenson held a fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and began to meet and mix with a generation of younger poets, one of whom was Motion.
"Anne promoted a pioneering programme of readings at the Old Fire Station Arts Centre," says Motion, "and we began to meet and exchange drafts. She was instrumental in getting my first collection, The Pleasure Steamers, off the ground. We found a wavelength because she was interested, as I was, in expanding the scope of lyric poetry, and we had long discussions as to what a lyric poem might be."
In fact, Stevenson had begun to expand the scope of lyric poetry exponentially, with her long narrative poem "Correspondences" (1973). A historical saga of a New England family in letters, prose and verse - she fondly refers to it as "my 19th-century novel - the poem was pieced together painfully over two, tempestuous years in which her marriage to Elvin foundered. It is a heartfelt farewell to her mother, who died of cancer in 1963, and also the poem with which she "finally cut the umbilical cord to the America my parents taught me to believe in":
So I cry and cry and then
wish there were some way to justify
the release of it.
For it's not for her particular death,
but for what dies with her.
Something that calls
For our abduction
out of things. Nostalgia
for expended generations.
Her second marriage over, Stevenson met, and was briefly married to Michael Farley, a poet 15 years her junior. The drama of this intense, competitive relationship was played out in the literary town of Hay-on-Wye, where they attempted, with fitting irony, to establish a poetry bookshop in a former morgue.
"It was nuts," she recalls, "two people with no business sense whatsoever attempting to get along, with our combined families, in tiny living quarters above the shop. Looking back on it, it seems as if we behaved like naughty children on holiday from school. We once received a government grant to bring over a group of Yugoslav poets, which we thought was a marvellously progressive idea. I had no understanding that the Serbs would not get on with the Croats, and the Bosnians would not get along with anybody. The only way to resolve the political differences was to spend the entire grant on brandy."
Her appointment as Northern Arts Literary Fellow in 1981 brought her for the first time to the north-east, with which she fell in love, and which has been her home ever since. In 1987 she married the Darwin scholar Peter Lucas ("my last marriage", she says emphatically) and commenced work on Bitter Fame, believing that "a quiet, new grandmotherly chapter of my life was about to begin".
"I think marriage to Peter Lucas has been absolutely invaluable to Anne," says John Lucas (no relation), a close friend. "She has always been ill at ease with domesticity, and I wonder if the leaving of her various relationships has been because her development as an artist needed that spur of displacement."
"I have never blamed any of my husbands for the collapse of three marriages," says Stevenson. "It was certainly my fault as much as theirs. I was an uncompromising, difficult person to live with - and hopeless with the children. But I would never have got married three times if it had seemed socially acceptable to live with a partner first. I suppose that's the puritan streak in me asserting itself again - I thought it morally reprehensible not to be married."
If she assumed marriage to Lucas would usher in a quiet, settled phase, she had not foreseen the furore that accompanied the publication of Bitter Fame in 1989. It was the first Plath study to apportion equal blame in the failure of the relationship with Hughes. Plath scholars were outraged - one rival biographer declared it the worst book she had ever read. John Lucas recalls the time as "a disaster for Anne - that book cost her far more than the three years of her life she took to write it". The book's reception wounded her deeply, and she resolved never to write another biography.
"Bitter Fame had the misfortune to come out when the Plath industry was still engaged in hurling things over the barricades," says Motion, "but the book's great strength was that it showed Anne's ability, as with all her work, to ignore common wisdom and received opinion and cut through to the sense of things."
Janet Malcolm's overview of Plath scholarship, The Silent Woman (1994), assessed Bitter Fame to be "by far the most intelligent, and the only authentically satisfying" of all Plath biographies. But it was not until Hughes's unexpected decision to break his silence with the publication in 1998 of Birthday Letters, the poetic chronicle of his relationship with Plath, that Stevenson's account of the relationship was more generally vindicated. Stevenson has written that "with the publication of Birthday Letters, it was as if the literary world suddenly woke up to find the balance between the two poets restored".
It has remained, however, a source of deep frustration to Stevenson that her notoriety as a biographer should overshadow her achievement as a poet. In a valedictory poem, "Letter to Sylvia Plath", she hails her contemporary as "the fiercest poet of our time", but concludes: "My shoulder does not like your claw." "I think Sylvia Plath was important to Anne long before she wrote the biography," says Motion. "You can hear that pure, Plath-like clarity in her lyrics - by that I do not mean to suggest they are derivative, but that there are such close similarities between the two poets' careers. They were both bold, New England women who came to make a name for themselves as poets in this country, at the same time as struggling to bring up a family. And you could say that Anne was the stronger and more successful of the two - she survived."
Stevenson's two most recent collections, Granny Scarecrow (2000) and last year's A Report From the Border, contain some of her most profound work and Stevenson believes they may represent the culmination of her career. "As a poet, I find myself writing in phases. I felt that those two volumes constituted one such period, which seemed to be a summation of everything I had to say. As one ages one acquires the ability to perceive the world with an increased sense of perspective. It becomes increasingly evident that one is not, after all, the centre of the universe. It's quite a liberation actually, when one's own ego no longer blocks the view." More recently she has been working on the libretto for a "feminist opera" which she says is also a satire on feminist dogma. She has also made several attempts at fiction.
Stevenson's daughter Caroline, who has worked as a photographer and teacher, now lives in Bristol where she pilots a ferry on the Waterfront. Her son John is a biochemist, while Charles has travelled widely and works in personnel. She has four grandchildren. "I think it is very rare for a poet to actually get better with age," says Dunmore, "but I think Anne does. Recently, she has written about the experience of ageing with a candour and honesty unparalleled in contemporary poetry."
Neither wholly British, nor completely American, Stevenson's oeuvre might be better known if it were easier to place. "I suspect she never quite receives her due because the American establishment regards her as a British poet, while the British think she's American," suggests Astley. Parini agrees: "Americans are very suspicious of anything British when it comes to poetry. There is a sense that she has been out of the country too long. She is subtle and profound, with a quiet grace of spirit, yet these qualities necessarily make her a poet for a smallish audience."
Asked whether she regards herself as British or American, Stevenson replies, with characteristic irony, that she feels equally disenchanted with both. "I belong to an America which no longer really exists. The New England part of me is the best part - puritan values: feet-on-the-ground, rationality, common sense. I don't identify with the consumerism of modern America, the short-termism, the sanctification of success. Globalisation has made the world such a tiny place that it seems increasingly irrelevant to say whether I'm English or American: we both appear to be eating out of the same trough."
Motion points out that "she has never lost that sense of being on the edge of things, artistically and geographically, and maybe she needs to remain peripheral because that is where the clarity and perspective of her art come from." Stevenson accepts that her transient life and avoidance of the mainstream may have been a conscious decision. "Ever since I can remember I have been aware of living at what EM Forster called 'a slight angle' to the universe," she says. "I have always had to create my own angular environment or perish." As she proceeds through her 70s, she remains a quiet, but significant voice from the border. "But that's the whole point about borders," she says. "It's the best place from which to be able to see both sides."
Anne Stevenson
Born: January 3 1933, Cambridge.
Educated: University High School, Ann Arbor, Michigan; University of Michigan.
Family: 1955-60 Robin Hitchcock (one daughter, Caroline); '63-79 Mark Elvin (two sons, John and Charles); '79-80 Michael Farley; '87- Peter Lucas.
Career: 1973 Literary Fellow, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; '81-82 Northern Arts Literary Fellow; '89 writer-in-residence Edinburgh University.
Some poetry: 1969 Reversals; '74 Correspondences; '87 Selected Poems; '96 Collected Poems 1955-1995; 2000 Granny Scarecrow; '03 A Report from the Border.
Some books: 1966 Elizabeth Bishop; '89 Bitter Fame; '98 Between the Iceberg and the Ship: Selected Essays, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop.
Awards: 2003 Northern Rock Foundation Award.
December 14, 2007
Anne Stevenson: the secret life of a poet
Anne Stevenson has been writing verse for more than 40 years without attracting attention outside a small circle. Now, at 74, the prizes are rolling in. Tom Gatti asks her why
Stone Milk by Anne
Stevenson
Bloodaxe, £7.95; 72pp
Poems 1955-2005 by Anne
Stevenson
Bloodaxe, £12; 413pp
ANNE STEVENSON IS A well-kept secret. She has published 18 volumes of poetry, but you won't find her in The Nation's Favourite Poems. She has lived and written in Britain for more than 40 years but has never won a national poetry prize. She was a contemporary of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes but hasn't come within a mile of their fame.
All that might be about to change, however. If there is such a thing as a poetry jackpot, Stevenson has just hit it: this year she has won three important American literary prizes, together worth $260,000 (£130,000), and in 2008 the Library of America will publish a new edition of her Selected Poems, edited by Andrew Motion. All the more remarkable, this sudden rush of recognition has come in her 75th year.
Stevenson's creative powers are undiminished by age. Approaching her Victorian townhouse at the top of a steep hill in Durham, I hear her playing piano: a complex passage, fortissimo chords leaking into the street. Inside, I am struck by her birdlike alertness: sharp features framed by a schoolgirl fringe, direct, canny eyes. She has been deaf since her mid-thirties, but a cochlear implant allows her to hold close conversations, as long as she can see the other person. At times, struggling to hear, she leans forward, face creasing with concentration, eyes searching.
Why all these awards, I ask, and why now? Stevenson puts it down to her recent Poems 1955-2005, which had a good reception in America: “I think people were surprised because until then I had been known only as Sylvia Plath's biographer [Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath was published in 1989], so they were really reading me as a poet for the first time. The poems in that collection form quite a body of work.”
Taken together, Stevenson's poems create a landscape that is, as the poet George Szirtes writes, “humane, intelligent and sane, composed of both natural and rational elements, and amply furnished with patches of wit and fury”. Her language is often direct, but her lines are taut with challenging ideas, and sprung with a tough survival mechanism; a willingness to bear one's cross, a need “To charm the world and not be crushed by it”.
She has always been wary of reputation — her manifesto poem Making Poetry describes the necessity of evading “the ego-hill, the misery-well,/the siren hiss of publish, success” — and although obviously pleased with her Indian summer, she maintains that prizes themselves do not interest her. “If your poems are good they win the ultimate prize of surviving you. That's why you keep your finger on the thread of Ariadne through the maze; if you're careful you can see it glistening ahead of you in the distance.”
Following the thread of Stevenson's own life — through four marriages, three children, and dozens of homes on both sides of the Atlantic — is not easy. She was born in Cambridge in 1933, the year that Hitler came to power; her American parents lived there while her father studied philosophy. Soon they moved back to the States, where Charles Stevenson taught at Yale until his book Ethics and Language earned him a sudden dismissal (its insistence on the moral relativity of language proved unpopular at a time when the Allies needed Hitler to be pure “evil”). They finally settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Anne's mother fostered a love of fiction, her father a passion for music and poetry: by the time that she reached university, Anne had read all of Shakespeare and most major English novels, and was an accomplished pianist and cellist. Both Anne and her younger sister Diana were enthusiastic pupils: “She took violin lessons and fell in love with her violin teachers, one after the other, I took piano lessons and fell in love with my piano teachers — irrespective of sex.”
Anne studied cello for two years at the University of Michigan before deciding that she would never be a first-rate cellist. But she never abandoned music — it became the springboard and the backbone of her verse, “the sound leading the hand”, as she writes in Making Poetry.
Her engagement to a childhood friend, Robin Hitchchock, took her back to Cambridge in 1954, where she glimpsed the life of “real” poets. His mother, Helen, ran St Botolph's Rectory, a student lodgings and the “spiritual home” of Ted Hughes and his group, who named their magazine St Botolph's Review after it. When she stayed at St Botolph's Anne would hear the poets singing boisterously in the kitchen but never joined them: “I was too shy, and Robin would have been very disapproving.”
Had she met Hughes and Plath, her life might have gone in a different direction; instead she had a daughter and followed her husband, a management consultant, to London, Belfast, Georgia and Mississippi. “We were living in so many places that I never made any friends: I became very lonely. And I was not a very good mother. I lived in a period when women who had, throughout university, been the equals of men suddenly found themselves settled, with small children, without help, with no way to escape... Although I didn't go mad like Sylvia Plath, I got pretty close to it.”
Here the thread begins to tangle. Stevenson and Hitchcock divorced, and, daughter in tow, she returned to the US to study. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, she married a Sinologist, Mark Elvin, and returned to England, to the other Cambridge, “to try being a wife again”. They had two sons and moved to Glasgow, where Stevenson escaped for a taste of the artist's life that had previously been denied her, moving in with the poet Philip Hobsbaum and — while sharing her children with Mark — joining a vibrant community of writers.
In Glasgow, she finished a long poem, Correspondences, which dealt — from a distance — with her family's puritan background and the stiff inherited morality that was paralysing her with guilt and anxiety. “When I began Correspondences I was one miserable girl. But by the end of it I had grown up a few moral inches.”
There were spells in Oxford, Dundee, Hay-on-Wye and Sunderland, a third marriage in the early 1980s, then her fourth (and current) in 1987, to a lawyer, Peter Lucas. Soon after, her Plath biography thrust her into the spotlight: its signs of sympathy for Hughes enraged Plath supporters, particularly Al Alvarez, who dismissed it as “a minor poet's envy of a major poet”. But by then reputation had ceased to matter much to Stevenson. “The great thing is learning not to take oneself so seriously. Life is short — very short — and you're going to be dead a long time.”
These days, death is part of her life; she has survived many friends and lovers, some remembered in a long poem entitled A Lament for the Makers in her new collection, Stone Milk. Death is present throughout the book but never seems to inspire fear; Stevenson takes comfort from placing our stories in the context of the greater, geological story of the Earth. Through DNA and memory we are — even after death — part of the “whole chain of existence”: “floating, stretching between,/the mind's harmonic mappings,/frail as gossamer”.
It's a pragamatic, holistic philosophy, and one that, as far as she is concerned, renders mythology and religion reduntant; prizes and plaudits too. All Anne Stevenson needs now, in the twilight years of an extraordinary life, is the knowledge that she has been a functioning link in the chain: “I think I have achieved my potential; I've done what I can do. I couldn't have done differently, and I couldn't have done better.”
Published: 6 January 2015
After Jane Austen’s death in 1817 at the age of forty-one, her sister destroyed many of her letters. There was, as a result, little biographical material from which to draw when her nephew, Edward Austen-Leigh, assembled A Memoir of Jane Austen (1869). He was forced to rely mostly on the recollections of relatives to construct that quaint version of his “dear Aunt Jane”, often portraying her as far more domestic and unconcerned about her work than later writings suggest. It was actually in a letter to Austen-Leigh that Jane Austen famously referred to her own writings as “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour”. In fact, “the little bit of ivory” was a slim pocket notebook composed of pieces of ivory bound together and on which one could make notes in pencil and later erase.
It is true, of course, that Austen’s novels of manners operate on a smaller scale too, and though she elsewhere wrote, again self-effacingly, that they concerned only “four or five families in a country village”, the ongoing popularity of the novels and their film adaptations shows that the vagaries of society life persist to this day. As Anne Stevenson indicates in “Re-reading Jane”, we are still “pricked to tears by the justice of her violence”, and Austen would no doubt have taken pleasure in divesting us of our “self-pity” even two centuries later. Yet Stevenson also seems to diminish Austen’s work at first, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek manner, when she asks: “Why do we turn to her sampler squares for solace?” Given that (as her epitaph in Winchester Cathedral implies), Austen was all but forgotten as an artist on her death and that most of her now immortal characters were never “free of snobbery or class”, Stevenson wonders why readers so often return to her novels. Stevenson’s playful but pointed answer quickly follows as she reminds us of “the needlework of those needle eyes” that “knew the mischief poetry could do”. In the final lines of the poem in which she quotes Anne Elliot inPersuasion (1818), Stevenson at last gives credit to Austen (“votary of order, sense, clear art / And irresistible fun”) who paved the way for future writers, and especially women, by refusing the “safety” of anonymity and never sparing her contemporaries the sharpness of her vision.
Re-reading Jane
The memorial to Jane Austen in
Winchester Cathedral reads, in part, as follows: ‘The benevolence of her heart,
the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind
obtained the regard of all who knew her and the warmest love of her intimate
connections’. No mention is made of her novels.
To women
in contemporary voice and dislocation
She is closely invisible, almost an annoyance.
Why do we turn to her sampler squares for solace?
Nothing she saw was free of snobbery or class.
Yet the needle work of those needle eyes . . . .
We are pricked to tears by the justice of her violence:
Emma on Box Hill, rude to poor Miss Bates,
By Mr. Knightley’s Were
she your equal in situation –
But consider how far this is from being the case
Shamed into compassion, and in shame, a grace.
Or wicked
Wickham and selfish pretty Willoughby,
Their vice, pure avarice which, displacing love,
Defiled the honour marriages should be made of;
She punished them with silly wives.
Novels of manners? Hymenal theology!
Six little circles of hell with attendant humours.
For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbours
And laugh at them in our turn? The
philosophy
Paused at the door of Mr. Bennet’s century;
The Garden of Eden goes on in the grounds of Pemberley.
The
amazing epitaph’s ‘benevolence of heart’
Precedes ‘the extraordinary endowments of her mind’
And would have pleased her, who was not unkind.
Dear votary of order, sense, clear art
And irresistible fun, please pitch our lives
Outside self-pity we have wrapped them in,
And show us how absurd we’d seem to you.
You knew the mischief poetry could do.
And when Anne Elliot spoke of its misfortune
To be seldom safely enjoyed by those who
Enjoyed it completely, she spoke for you.
Anne Stevenson (1983)