Sophie Cabot Black, What I meant to say was

Joanne Diaz

Hello, I'm Joanne Diaz.

Abram Van Engen

And I'm Abram Van Engen.

Joanne Diaz

And this is Poetry for All.

Abram Van Engen

And today we have a very special guest, Sophie Cabot Black. Welcome to the podcast, Sophie.

Sophie Cabot Black

Thank you so much for having me, and for doing this wonderful project.

Joanne Diaz

Sophie Cabot Black is the author of four poetry collections. She is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.

Abram Van Engen

And Sophie's joining us today to talk about her poem for a brand-new collection of poetry that just came out, called Anne Bradstreet Now: Modern Poets Respond, which I co-edited with my friend Mary Eyring. So, as some of our listeners will know, but just to remind them, Anne Bradstreet was a Puritan poet who, in 1650, became the first American to publish a book of poems. And we asked over 20 amazing American poets to respond in poetry and prose to her world and work, and Sophie graciously responded. So this is Sophie Cabot Black's poem in response to Anne Bradstreet, called "What I meant to say was." And Sophie, would you be willing to read this for us?

Sophie Cabot Black

I'd love to. Thank you. What I meant to say was (Anne Bradstreet, Andover Massachusetts, Autumn 1669) Let the house burn again; Already I outlive the New World, The last dog dead, one cow Remnant in the gleaning wind Of leaf-fall and each child left For elsewhere. To stay Past those I buried; I do not know What more to spend -- The government of man By man brings no one home. No longer do I want To be upon this hill,

This place of so much wind Where I keep writing Past the end. I have broken Each sentence, halved Then half again, each word Simpled down like old oxen Kept as if to cover The whole field, turn By turn. Now the words Come less, the clouds so fast And now what I thought I thought. For what Have I survived: To save each house, A door sprung open, plain, Willing each hinge To work, verse By verse to outlast, Outlove whatever it is You bring forth.

Joanne Diaz

It's beautiful.

Abram Van Engen

It's beautiful. Thank you so much. I'm sort of curious first to hear from you about the experience of writing the poem. We reached out to a bunch of poets, and some were very unfamiliar with Anne Bradstreet and sort of took it upon themselves to become familiar with her in order to write for this book, and others were deeply familiar with Anne Bradstreet and saw it as an opportunity to revisit her work. Where did this project strike you when you began to think about responding to Anne Bradstreet?

Sophie Cabot Black

So I grew up as part of this larger New England family that came over on the Mayflower, and then kept coming over and kept marrying each other. And our genealogy is very much known by ourselves. And as soon as I began to write and start publishing, I was told that I was related to Anne Bradstreet, and that she was my great-grandmother to the 13th power, whatever you want to call it, if you go 13 generations back.vSo I got excited about that in certain ways, and in certain ways I was sort of like, "Well, I don't really get her work." I was 17, 18 and in love with Adrienne Rich and various others, and I thought, "Okay, well, there's that, but so what?" So I moved on. And when I went to graduate school at Columbia, I got something in my craw: I really wanted to write from the point of view of a woman on the Mayflower, and our family is the Chilton family. So I applied to the Fine Arts Work Center and thought, "I'm going to go park myself there for a year and really write in her voice."

I quickly decided the Chilton family wasn't dramatic enough, and that Dorothy Bradford was an interesting project for me. She was one of the first deaths that happened. She actually fell, or perhaps jumped, off the Mayflower while she was in Provincetown. Most people believe she accidentally fell, but as we know—yeah. So I wrote a long poem in her voice, and it turned into a hugely long poem in Dorothy Bradford's voice, and I was very strict. I had an OED in front of me. This is before the internet; it was the '80s. And I looked up every word to make sure she would've actually had access to that word, been able to use her imagination to say it. I really wanted it to be as pure as possible. So, great project. Loved it. Changed my heart, my soul, writing it. And it ended up in my first book. But meantime, I was still intrigued with Bradstreet. And it turns out I'm also related to Anne Hutchinson—

Joanne Diaz

Oh my.

Sophie Cabot Black

—who is a fascinating creature. She's also a great-great-great-grandmother. And it wasn't until recently, the last five, 10 years, that I decided I would have them meet in some kind of dialogue, which actually perhaps could have—it didn't happen—

Abram Van Engen

Let me just pause real quick for our listeners, to make sure that they know who Anne Hutchinson is. She was a very powerful speaker and leader. She started teaching in her home. Lots of people gathered around her, and this really upset the colony leaders, in part because she was offering a kind of vision of spirituality that was a challenge to some of the structures and some of the theologies they had in place. Long story short, they ended up excommunicating her from the church and banishing her from the colony, and she ended up in Rhode Island. So that's Anne Hutchinson, who is, exactly as you say, coterminous with Anne Bradstreet. And actually some of Anne Bradstreet's relatives—I think her husband was involved, and certainly her father was involved—in the banishment of Anne Hutchinson.

Joanne Diaz

Oh my goodness.

Abram Van Engen

So two women with powerful voices, one of whom is praised and one of whom is banished.

Sophie Cabot Black

Exactly. And I had the idea, or fantasy, that they might have been able to meet in one of the holding cells they held her in in Boston, because I think there was a possible crossover there for a couple of days. So that was the idea, and I hadn't really followed through on it, and then you contacted me. So I thought, "Okay, I am just going to throw myself into Anne Bradstreet's world." So it was really a great project. And now I have it in my little hands, so it's going to be fascinating to see where people took this.

Abram Van Engen

Well, the poem, as you get into Bradstreet's voice here, takes up so many of the tensions that are evident across her poems. And there are two particular tensions I think you deal with so well here. One is, as you say at the beginning of your prose commentary, the poem "shows signs of a struggle with how to reconcile what she has been taught with what she intuits. Bradstreet's life has alternately been filled with faith and doubt." And so there is this question of what her relationship is to this God for whom and from whom she seems to be writing, and yet she's also writing beyond that.

But then there's this other tension I also want to look into

this sense of what will last when she is gone. I feel like that is so present in so many of her poems. It's part of why she dwells on other people's fame so much. There's this constant worry on her part about, "Well, what does come after I'm gone?" At the same time, within her own Puritan faith world, she really shouldn't be worried about that. She should only be worried about not her fame on Earth, but her standing with God.

Sophie Cabot Black

Absolutely agree. It had to enter her poems. What does she do about the children who are going to outlive her? What does she do about the children who don't outlive her? What is she leaving behind for them? It's almost a compulsion that you have no control over as a human being. It feels animalistic. It's so primordial, you can't help but wonder. I often thought about her relationship with fame, and I hear what you're saying, but I also think what enters into that conversation for her is what she's leaving behind in terms of—to be really blunt about it—her DNA, her family, her love, her family values.

Joanne Diaz

As I hear you talking about her work, she has such rhetorical virtuosity, and yet her writing is full of doubt and uncertainty. And that's what I love about your title for your poem. I love it for a few reasons. One is that the title is "What I meant to say was," and you have to read the poem to see how you fill in that blank, right? But the reason I'm so drawn to the title is that it seems to function like a kind of corrective, a way to suggest that her life's work as a poet is not entirely finished. I just couldn't help but think of your poetry from elsewhere, like in your book The Exchange. I was thinking of your first poem in that book, called "Already Broken," and the first couple lines of that poem read, "You must write as if all along / a flaw was on the bone. One place not quite right." And I was like, wait a minute, you're the perfect person to write a dramatic monologue for Anne Bradstreet, because that concern with error, the idea that the poet is always second-guessing themselves, is right at the front of your poem here, and I really admire that.

Sophie Cabot Black

I appreciate that you picked those lines. They're actually a core belief of mine, and I think it actually excuses my atheism, if you will. Or even more so, it confirms the idea that nothing is perfect and nothing will be perfect, and that if indeed there is a higher power, they love us with our imperfections, and we must go forward anyway. And be okay with our mortality, and be okay with the flaw in the bone, and be okay with the surprise ending that we didn't expect because there was a flaw in the bone. And I would imagine that would enter most good art. Perfection is not what we are looking for, and to be imperfect is what the cry of the heart is about. To be allowed to be imperfect. To be living with the imperfections, and to go forward and be able to meet whatever end you've got going on, or whatever you believe your end is going to look like, with that in mind. So I really appreciate you picking up those two lines.

Abram Van Engen

Well, it's a great title, and then you get to that incredible first line: "Let the house burn again." That's just such a dramatic first line for the poem. And of course it's bringing up the fact that her house did burn down, and we have this poem about it called "Verses Upon the Burning of Our House." And in that poem, just a few lines in, she's got this very strange grammatical construction where she says, "That fearful sound of 'Fire!' and 'Fire!' / Let no man know is my desire." At a basic level, what she's saying is, "I don't want anyone to have to know this sound, 'Fire! Fire!' I don't want anyone else to have to experience what I'm experiencing by having their house burn down." But because the grammar is so inverted and so strange, it's led a lot of people to ask, "Did she secretly harbor a desire for this?" Let nobody know that actually my secret desire is for this thing to burn down and start over. In fact, there's a great essay by Ana Schwartz called "Anne Bradstreet, Arsonist?" and it reconceives her work along totally different lines. How did you know that this was the place you wanted to begin? "What I meant to say was: Let the house burn again."

Sophie Cabot Black

Abram, you just nailed it. You really did. And I think sometimes you can't speak about your own work well, but I think that's what I also do sometimes: invert my grammar or my syntax so that there's an opening toward the other side of that. And I always felt that in those lines—first of all, to have desire in the middle of an Anne Bradstreet poem is shocking already, as a word, as a noun. And of course there's passion in there, and maybe even sexual innuendo. But there's also the idea of ridding oneself of everything and starting over, of beginning again, of being loose from everything that had you tied down, which in that era would've meant making sure everything was safe before you went to bed. Not that we don't do that now, but there's something inherently exhausting about being a household holder.

And I think that was part of my project

to understand what it would feel like, including having to let go of all of the children and grandchildren that didn't make it. Having to move again, maybe a simpler life. I think in this era we sometimes dream about simplifying our life enormously. Let it all burn down. Let's just figure it out again, or figure it out differently, or more simply. I wanted that in there, and to begin with "Let the house burn again" was such an obvious place. In 1669, I think she was turning around and looking back at her life, thinking about the things she didn't get to do, or that she did get to do that were still around her neck. I don't know. I let myself be a little free with that.

Abram Van Engen

One of the things Joanne and I noticed is that there's a wonderful interplay between where line ends happen and where sentences happen. Do you want to talk about the relationship you think about, when you're writing, between line ends, stanza breaks, and sentences?

Sophie Cabot Black

Oh, it's one of my favorite things to teach. Again, it's a great dialectic for the student: holding the full sentence, whatever the grammar ends up looking like, against the enjambment and the line breaks that poets can use and often do use. Throughout this poem I like the subtlety of what I can do—for example, with "leaf fall and each child left." We don't know what that left means. It could be left as in no longer on the planet. It could be left as in they left to begin their own families. Or it could be that each child is left with her, and she's still taking care of it. So I wanted that to be suspended enough that the reader felt all three versions of what it might mean until we got to "for elsewhere." And again, elsewhere can imply all those places. And then I wanted her to earn how to be able to stay, and then "past those I buried." Every line break here is very much desired and known and purposeful, and I wanted it to bring the reader to a white space to take in what just happened before they went to the next turn, if you will.

Abram Van Engen

Listeners, if you don't have the poem in front of you: what she's saying is that "To stay" is the end of a line. And if you dwell on "to stay" before you move to the next line, "past those I buried," it turns what the staying means on its head. It reads as one thing, "to stay past those I buried," but the break happens in the middle of that phrase.

Sophie Cabot Black

No, of course. Of course. I also wanted to nod to something I know you two are very keen on, because in the middle of the poem I have "I have broken each sentence, halved, then half again." If you took this poem and sort of mushed it all back together, it would be almost a sonnet. It would have five or six beats to each line. It would be 14, maybe 15 lines. To my mind, this was an expanded sonnet that started to spill out of her at the end of her life. As she simplifies, the lines get smaller and carry more intent, and the breaking of a sentence was what she was, quote, playing with. I'm playing with her idea of possibly breaking her sonnets at the end of her life, breaking things open and looking hard at them. "Each word simpled down like old oxen." And in the very last lines, I really wanted to slow the reader down, so that last stanza has four very short lines, and I used line breaks to really make the reader work, if you will.

Joanne Diaz

That's so great. And you're a kindred spirit to Anne Bradstreet, because in so much of your own work elsewhere, you've written so many sonnets. So even if the sonnet is not appearing in that traditional 14-line form here, the feel of a sonnet is here. At least for me as a reader, I'm really interested in how you talked about that. That's great.

Abram Van Engen

Yeah.

Joanne Diaz

In that section, "this place of so much wind where I keep writing past the end," the poem feels so much like an ars poetica to me as well. The next sentence reads, "I have broken each sentence, halved, then half again, each word simpled down like old oxen kept as if to cover the whole field, turn by turn." The turns—of course, I can't help but think of poetic turns. But why that simile comparing Anne Bradstreet's sentences, halved and then halved again, to old oxen? It seems as if they're tilling the field for new opportunities and new growth, just as she is with her poetry. Is that what you were thinking about?

Sophie Cabot Black

I was quite literally thinking about—and again, this is partly because I come from such a Yankee family—the idea of each word simpled down like old oxen. When you go out to till a field, or to bring a field back, of course then they had animals to do that with. And I was trying to imagine how she thought about the tilling of her field—in other words, the white page—and how lines turn. And absolutely there was a relationship, as in an ars poetica, between that particular stanza and her idea of how to make poems, or how to deal with words inside of poems. My imagination was that she had words she wanted to use, and realized she kept using the same words, but they were important to her, and they would help her get where she wanted to go in the turning of her field.

Joanne Diaz

That's beautiful. Yeah.

Abram Van Engen

And you make that connection. The end of that sentence is "turn by turn," and of course the word verse in poetry comes from the Italian verso, to turn—to turn at the end of a field, to make rows, to make lines. And that "turn by turn" becomes, by the end of the poem, an exact replica: "verse by verse to outlast." So the turns do in fact make that connection to verse by verse. We get the tilling of the field, and then this next sentence, contained within one stanza: "Now the words come less, the clouds so fast and not what I thought I thought."

Sophie Cabot Black

I do have friends who are beginning to not have the minds they used to have. And it's been hard to watch. You know, poets get to age gracefully, if they get to age. They get to age gracefully into their work, into their own oeuvre, and keep pushing themselves. And I'm imagining that Anne Bradstreet herself is not having the spryness or the quickness of mind that she used to have, and so she's trying to bring that to her page here, and also be okay with "not what I thought I thought"—both literally, with weather, if you will, because weather can be very capricious and it's never what you think is going to happen. But also perhaps, and this is coming to the end, God was not what she thought.

Abram Van Engen

Yeah.

Sophie Cabot Black

It was never what she was told to think. It didn't turn out to be what she thought, and there are a lot of question marks still there.

Abram Van Engen

And those question marks are picked up immediately in the next line, which I feel like the whole poem is headed toward. There's a way that each line we've gone through so far is like a clearing of the field so that she can ask herself this question: "For what have I survived?" Again, that's broken across two stanzas. "For what" is the end of a line, and then a line by itself, "have I survived?" And then she begins to answer that question, but it also feels like a tentative answer, like the answer is itself a question: "To save each house, a door sprung open, plain, willing each hinge to work, verse by verse to outlast, outlove whatever it is you bring forth." I know when we went back and forth about this poem, Sophie, while we were collecting these things for the book—can you talk a little bit about the multiple endings you were approaching for this poem, and how we landed where we land?

Sophie Cabot Black

I do want to say that this penultimate stanza has big metaphors for me: house, door, and hinge. Obviously those would be very much a part of her world, in everyday movements. But house can be household, as in each child and each family going off into its universe without her. The door sprung open—I feel that's a portal, that she's always been going back and forth between outside and inside, between God and her soul. And then a hinge is what we use to get somewhere, like a bridge almost. So that was an important stanza for me to get plain, if you will. Okay, so the last verse began in the way I would normally end a poem, without the audacity or bravery that it ended up with. Can I read you the first draft's last stanza?

Abram Van Engen

Yeah, please do. Yeah.

Sophie Cabot Black

"To trample the already trampled barn to house to barn again, the sun beating me each a little more, even as we see ever no one, the leaves fully gone and each tree in a cold tremble." So that was the very first draft. "The leaves fully gone and each tree in a cold tremble." That's how I wanted to end it. That was supposed to resemble what the Puritans, or the Europeans, were up against as they headed into each winter—

Abram Van Engen

Mm-hmm.

Sophie Cabot Black

—and how different it was from their old life. But for me, that ending didn't capture the tension I thought was so important about how intentional the removal of Bradstreet's family had been. So I went to a middling ending, which was: "I admit nothing saved to be noticed, and to what end? Just to see if He would show?" And I thought that was weak and not brave enough, because the He was too small and too distanced. And so that's how the He became a You. And the You became really important, because I felt it could be both a human you and a God you. And again, because I capitalize each left-hand margin, I get away with that ambiguity, if you will. If everything's capitalized, it could be a human you or it could be a God you. I brought this poem to a friend of mine who is a wonderful, very well-known poet, and she is Catholic, or grew up Catholic, and I believe that's still her belief system. And she said, "Just take out you and put God in there." And I felt that was not enough.

That closed everything down, and I wanted the overtones of the self to be in there along with the other, because I wanted us to feel Bradstreet's wrestling with both self-reliance and self-doubt, with the pragmatic and the precarious. But really, what do we do? What is the belief system I'm going to hold onto at the end? Whatever God or weather or husband or death or nature brings forth, we never know. And so trying to outlove whatever it is was an important move for me to give her at the end of her life.

Abram Van Engen

That's great. And the you is a relationship. And it's a relationship she has to figure out: Is this in fact a relationship? Is there a you there with whom I'm having this relationship? Or am I outlasting and outloving, and therefore bringing forth something from a kind of nothing—a relationship that did not have a partner?

Sophie Cabot Black

No, you're absolutely right. And the idea is to outlast the death and the losses she has accumulated over these years. But then to outlove is a huge leap. Coming to love the world no matter what is one of the most difficult things a human has to run into and make a choice about. And to my mind, that's part of the peace you make with whatever belief system you have: you're choosing to outlove whatever it is you bring forth, whatever it is that happens. And so that was the leap, the big leap, for me.

Abram Van Engen

With all that we've learned about this poem, would you be willing to read it for us again?

Sophie Cabot Black

Of course. What I meant to say was (Anne Bradstreet, Andover Massachusetts, Autumn 1669) Let the house burn again; Already I outlive the New World, The last dog dead, one cow Remnant in the gleaning wind Of leaf-fall and each child left For elsewhere. To stay Past those I buried; I do not know What more to spend -- The government of man By man brings no one home. No longer do I want To be upon this hill,

This place of so much wind Where I keep writing Past the end. I have broken Each sentence, halved Then half again, each word Simpled down like old oxen Kept as if to cover The whole field, turn By turn. Now the words Come less, the clouds so fast And now what I thought I thought. For what Have I survived: To save each house, A door sprung open, plain, Willing each hinge To work, verse By verse to outlast, Outlove whatever it is You bring forth.

Abram Van Engen

Thank you so much. This is great. If you want to check out this poem and many others that approach Anne Bradstreet's work in fresh ways and offer new angles into what she was doing, why she was doing it, and how she did it, check out our new book, Anne Bradstreet Now: Modern Poets Respond. I'd be grateful if you'd check it out, and so would all the many awesome poets involved in this project. Thank you so much for being here with us, Sophie.

Sophie Cabot Black

My pleasure. Thank you for doing this, and thank you again for such a wonderful project.

Joanne Diaz

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Abram Van Engen

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