Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the ‘prehistoric’ epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She was a former editor of South and West, is currently a contributing editor to Eviscerator Heaven and, recently, a Review Editor for Calliope Nerve. She has published near 400 poems, many in her first three chapbooks released in her ‘first manifestation’ as a poet, and has recently released her first two chaps in 20 years, Tinted Steam (Shadow Archer Press) and Sublunary Curse (Erbacce). A new full length manuscript, eBook Paper Cut (Paraphilia Books) will be released in Summer 2009. Her most recent work appears in such 'zines as ditch, ken*again, Pen Himalaya, Rain Over Bouville, Clockwise Cat, Hanging Moss, Neonbeam, Counterexample Poetics, and Gloom Cupboard. She was recently “Featured Poet” for the Guild of Outsider Writers. Her website is HERE. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but no less so than Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto.

Constance Stadler discusses her recently released books, her educational background, and her musical influences with Counterexample Poetics editor, Felino Soriano

Felino Soriano: Connie, the beginning question I pose to you revolves around stimulation in the sense of bringing the need or want to write a poem. Can you share what this entails, what brings you into the mind position of sitting to write, and shaping the poem's body?

Constance Stadler: Thank you, Felino, I cannot help to begin with these words by Voltaire although the interrelationship is far more complex: “Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.”

Indeed, as poetry and music are intertwined for you, the axis being jazz in its wondrous transpositional infinite intimacies, so they are for me. The violin is the most intimate music I know. I can feel it course through my entire being, deep into soul. I will bring up a poem I wrote in a bit that says much about this relationship. I am amused by the fact that everyone thinks it is a metaphor about a passionate lover. It is, but the passion is in the text of the poem, the violin, the music I am playing, is the beloved. The violin can decimate me; it can stop breath ~ true all my life. Why? Why do we fall in love? Like poetry, the violin is a deeply emotive and visceral experience. I have played it most of my life. But I knew, at a very young age that it would ultimately break my heart. I would give it all, but I did not have near the whisper of capability of a Perlman, Hahn, Heifetz, Cho-Liang Lin... The violin requires such intense physical contact. As you tuck it under your chin and tune it, and the reverberations go through your entire body, the soul actually leaps, startled. To take a bow and in grand swoops of abandon, to capture the magic of the E-string playing Mendelssohn or the unrelenting demands of Paganini, Bruch’s Concerto in D Minor, the sweet perfection of Pachebel’s wondrous Canon in D. This is heraldic. To hit an F sharp on the E string and with overflowing vibrato, caress it to life; you are immersed in the creation of beauty both universal and so personal. How is that unlike the creation of a great poem? Indeed, let me share that poem I mentioned now, as it truly sums the nature of this love through my words:

… frémissement un coeur, qu'on afflige…*

Time
Distance
The remarkable capacity of the human mind to eradicate
what is most dear
will never separate us.

You cup my chin.
My left hand bends softly around your exquisite neck
as it has done
Since that very first time…
Fingertips dig deep into your hollows of response
Caressing without mercy
The fibers of my whirlwind wand lay firmly on
your belly.
Tense, taut, quivering in expectation
The aching gyre
Your liquid sonorous sobs
We are one again.
We begin.
Tear, tug, jerk,
whimper
scordatura
arco, arco, détaché, collé
portato, tenuto,
legatissimo,
legatissimo,
legatissimo…

The moans of Saint-Saëns shatter
the darkened linden trees
at the feet of entombed lovers
undulating in their shrouds…
screaming
at the voracious insatiability
of renewal
of our union.
Laughing
at the helpless penetration of my
peau de chagrin.
And,
as ever
whenever
I lie you down.

‘like a monstrance
(Mon ostensoir)

your memory
(Ton souvenir)

steeps a muted body
sheaths its mottled soul.

* trembling my afflicted heart, a variation on Baudelaire

Does this affect my prosodic sensibilities and musicality as a poet? The passions infuse each other. But although I do not know how ~ Duane Locke does. I know when interior rhyme is off-pitch, when a poem is off-tempo. I have complete trust in my ability to musically discern a write. I believe the depth of my connection to both music and art is not unlike tributaries of a stream that courses through every aspect of my being. My stream… my being…
I cannot listen to any music when I write, it is too invasive, too much, there is competition in my mind. Just last night, in a poetry workshop that I teach, I went through an exercise I have done/conducted 100 times before. I do sensory isolations. Last night was music. I had compiled this CD, burned it, played it twenty times in preparing for the class, but when it came to the actual doing, I partook in the exercise, my mind a blank canvas. Words, imprints, impressions toppled out of me as an avalanche, I could not stop writing, it was as if I’d never heard it before. I don’t think I know a poet that is not deeply connected to music.

But this is my connection, my path, and what you ask remains a fascinating question.

FS: The metaphoric encounter, vis-à-vis frémissement un coeur, qu'on afflige is a brilliant one. I would agree with your assertion that many poets are among music engagers, regardless of genre or musical understanding. For the musicality of poetry can become an echo of preferential data that escapes from the music which we find enjoyable.

I’d like now, Connie, to move into another form of your background, your educational background. You are a trained political anthropologist. Within vast and various societal differences, the spectrum is immeasurable. This, of course includes the political ramifications, and how societal acclimation arrives to a brand of partnership with what is posited within this structure. Can you please, elaborate on your basis for wanting to study this interesting subject, and, as an addendum: Does political anthropology intertwine itself with your poetry?

CS: Poetry deals with the concept of relative and imposed absolute truths. It seeks to create and understand beauty and the inexplicable. It assaults us to look injustice and brutality in the face. It makes us uncomfortable in its challenges. It exposes our frailties and weaknesses. It gives many a voice that have none. It revels in new and different, it explains deep unearthed meanings; it creates new venues for communications. You stand as the writer in the center of an unforgiving spotlight until you expose your most rudimentary thoughts and elemental feelings in words that soar. It is universal and it is specific. How many times do we gasp in a read and say: “How could they know?” or “My God that IS me!”

I do not understand racism or classism, or any leverage through which ‘feeling superior’ as a human being is implicitly or explicitly condoned. I do not understand the minds of the powerful and cruel of the rapacious capitalist of the domestic abuser or anyone that enjoys inflicting pain. Coming from a childhood of horror you have two choices: become the horror or fight with your last breath to kill it. There is not an ounce of melodrama here. Nor do I say this is how all poets should feel. It is however, foundational to my being, my poetry and my life as a scholar and teacher.

Now I can begin.

I began the study of Islam by taking one class and reacting in fury: “Why did I not know any of this?” With this in mind I triple majored in Near Eastern Studies, Comparative Literature, and Political Science. The last because I felt great repressive forces on a global scale, the second to help me absorb myself in another country though its imagination. What I soon discovered in Comp. Lit. is that Arabic novels/poems were ‘beyond the canon’. I completed my master’s studies in Comparative Literature and Politics at the same time. Now a concept was burning into my brain. Why should not the fictional discourses of nations under authoritarian rule reveal much about its counter-elites, the voices of the oppressed who spoke for all? I began studying hermeneutics and phenomenology in depth and came up with a dissertation idea. Everyone in my field, political anthropology, was discussing ‘political culture’, the superstructure from which political infrastructure is derived as the terrain of elite-counter-elite struggle. There were three novelists, all brilliant radicals, who had each been imprisoned for their open challenges to the ruling monarch. But then one by one they began writing novels in French and Arabic. The bad patriarch’ was always the king, the concept, of ‘auto-decolonization of the mind’ was the next step, finally came rebuilding a whole new ‘Moroccan/human’ identity. I lived in Morocco for six years and I found this titration effect was being understood by reformists and radicals across the nation and beyond. Amazing!

So not only did I truly appreciate the word, its power, far more. I found a process through which could glean into humanity only deeper, glean into myself. I wrestled with the notion of “truth”, and what being a welcome/insider yet still an outsider meant. I recognized my own cultural finitude. I gasped every day and, often, wept and bled. I assumed self-ownership and thus re-immersed my self into poetry and my scholarship as one continuum of growth and inspiration. This habit of mind has without a doubt humanized my scholarship and profoundly enriched all my poetic voices.

FS: The inner collocation of the violin and political anthropology seems to be a dichotomous interrelation, which supremely infuses your work with wonderful musicality, and the needed empathy towards others and the world in a non cliché fashion. I would now, like to ask you about your published books: Tinted Steam (Shadow Archer Press) and Sublunary Curse (erbacce-press). What manifestation occurred within you to produce these two manuscripts? Also, if similarities or differences exist between the two, can you expound on the reality of these? And, finally, what are you currently devoting your time to, vis-à-vis poetry?

CS: Ah, these works are very different in theme. The cohesive concept of Tinted Steam came from the paintings of Turner as described by Ruskin. While many depicted, the tragic, the inhumane, there is always a misted ethereal beauty which creates a separate world. I believe my summation of the text is important here and reflects my inner most feelings about the text.

The thematic continuity of the poems presented herein has two impulses: impressionistic compositions of blended mnemonics and imaginary tributaries as well as existential reassertions of the metaphysical imperative. Intellectual engagement by the reader is as vital as emotional engagement. Seminal influences can be traced to John Donne, Marvell, and other Metaphysicians, T.S. Eliot’s flights of thoughtful challenge, Poe’s tone, prosody, euphony, and beautiful lamentations, Dylan Thomas’ word cascades, Gwendolyn Brooks’ ferocious honesty, to name but a few. Perhaps, most of all, the notion of ‘painful beauty’ may be found throughout, for such juxtaposition is seen as natural complement.

By contrast, Sublunary Curse begins its thematic message with the magnificent reproduction of Hokusai’s “The Great Wave” as cover. In brilliant hews of blue, black, brown with underbelly of white, the wave consumes the fisherman’s boat (quite revolutionary for Tokugawa Japan.). It represents Nature as a consuming destroyer, yet still so beautiful. The included works are thematically dark, whether describing, the nature of Man, the created world, the deep cruelties that we freely make and endure, the rage of nature, the rage of derangement, abuse, passion that is much like Hokusai’s relentless destructive power, the pathos of the redemptive search… This is my book of pain, in the wake of losing my entire immediate family to cancer and suffering a childhood only Bosch could capture. There were many screams that needed venting. I gave them full voice. It was truly cathartic. David Mclean wrote a wonderful review that means much to me, for it avers that my humanity was not destroyed, even as the poems are intended as universal expressions. If a poem cannot touch another as well as speak from the soul, it is not a poem. If I repeat myself, I apologize, but this goes to the core of my artistic impulsion.
These are David’s words.

Connie's book … runs the range from brutal cynicism over her inadequate fathering, through a powerful condemnation of clitoridectomy, to a delightful tribute to Poe. She anatomizes her subject matter with gusto and verve, and does so by enriching her words with the blessings of polyvalence to compensate them for the world they describe. Stadler knows what it means to "taste filth," but also the compensations of words, the "sensual glossolalia" that makes these poems little verbal ecstasies that reward careful reading, since they are rich and complex, not easy in the sense of "superficial" and simple, but it is easy to see the compassionate humanity that describes the less desirable aspects of existence as well as the best of them. Both bereavement and also the love that preceded it, both the clinic and also the innocence of the clinic's victims.

As to the present, I find that in the past few months, I have focused much on -to abscond from my friend Christopher Nosnibor - ‘clinical brutalities’. The small incising injuries we all endure. Each one a tiny slit, but soon, many scars form, a web of fine lined gradual soul-killings. I have also pondered on the meaning of being a poet. Thus my new collection for my upcoming eBook (my largest, 57 poems), is entitled Paper Cut. There is a double entendre in this deceptively simple title. Again, the most coherent explanation is the author’s summation:

"This life's dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye."

-William Blake, The Everlasting Gospel

The theme of this collection is simple: pain and beauty are inexorably intertwined. One makes the other more precious, and, in kind, agony becomes endurable. But there are many forms of agony, and in art as in life, it rarely comes in crashing blows but more of a ‘coffeespoon by coffespoon’ progression. The title of this book has, therefore, a dual meaning. It speaks of the dazzling suffering it means to be a poet, for as Blake notes above, we see and feel through our souls. You must turn your face to the center of the most ravishing bloom and let it consume, you must be aware of an all, or as Blake again puts it: “To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.” For this gift we endure so much and, for the dedicated artist, willingly so.

I offer another prism of beholding. These poems speak to specific slits and slivers that we each endure. Yes, some are gashes and some do not let us know of what has been wrought till the wound has seemingly long healed. There is also the issue of cost. In gaining and growing there is almost always a trade off. I fervently believe those who pay the fare will surely be brought to the shoreline of meaning and heart.

If someone had told me I would have over 200 poems published in my first year in my return to poetry- in the wake of twenty years of silence - I would have laughed hysterically in disbelief. But now I know that in being a poet, I must simply be willing to open and share my deepest visions and all, simply that, all. The bargain is willingly made. The future? In truth, wherever The Word takes me…

Read poetry by Constance Stadler published at Counterexample Poetics HERE and HERE.

This interview took place electronically between March 17, 2009 and April 2, 2009.