National Poetry Month is here! And the magnificent poet Rita Sims Quillen is my first guest for 3 Questions & a Poem.
QUESTION 1
What do you consider the three most important elements of a poem?
Sound, Sense, and Surprise:
A poem is not just prose broken up; it has to have an elevated sound and rhythm. My first love was music and it still is very important to my daily life, so I want poetry to have a musical element to it, whether it’s a kind of musical rhythm in some lines, or the beauty of alliteration and assonance. It’s got to have some important insights in it: or it has to call our attention to something that matters, that might get us somehow a little further, a little deeper than we were before we started reading the poem. And finally, I think every poem must have some element of surprise or delight. It can be in the sound and rhythm mentioned earlier, it can be in the subject matter itself, it can be in the poet’s unexpected voice or perspective, or tone, or it can be some sort of revelation or surprise or epiphany brought to the reader. Good poetry has to include all three of these, I believe.
QUESTION 2
What’s your best advice for writing poetry?
I’m not sure I have any! Poetry remains an absolute mystery to me, a beautiful mystery. I don’t understand where it comes from, why I hear these lines in my head, why at certain moments I know a poem is coming about something. But all you can do is remain open to it, to whatever you are obsessing about. That’s what poet’s do—it’s called metacognition. You think about what you’re thinking about and you try to drill down to what and why and how you came to be obsessed with that idea. Another thing I recommend is to read, read, read, and collect words. You are going to need all kinds of words, even obscure ones, foreign ones, rare and gilded words, because if you go for that musical sound and rhythm I mentioned earlier, the everyday words sometimes won’t do. Finally, don’t ever throw anything away. I have journals from 40 years ago: someday there might be a scribbled line in there that opens the door to a poem. I’ve had poems that took a decade or two to finally come out of the rusty filing cabinet in my head.
QUESTION 3
What’s the one poem that everyone should read today?
Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things.” So lovely, profound, rich, musical, and insightful.
Some Notes You Hold: New and Selected Poems is about surviving what life throws at us as we age. The so-called “golden years” are so named because of the high admission price—the tremendous losses, disappointments, illnesses, and failures we all experience if we live long enough. The first part of the book, called “Letting Go,” focuses on surviving deep grief. The middle section is a musical interlude, exploring the tremendous power of music to heal us mentally, physically, and spiritually and to reorder our thinking and our emotions. The last section, “Holding On,” explores the roads leading to survival: prayer and meditation, communion with the natural world, and writing. The price paid for those “golden years” leads to the prize: insight, joy, and a kind of peace we were incapable of when we were young.
& a POEM
FALLOW FIELDS
Rita Sims Quillen
And so it is this farm is a thousand days of questions like “What’s a meadow for?” and all the other hackneyed metaphors for all the stones that look like faces, and the stones white as bones and the fields covered in small shards of slate like broken hearts offering answers no one wants to hear. And so it is that the starlings and the bluebirds don’t speak, have no use for one another and the waxy soul inside the bee tree protects its heart from even hearing the hum and the coyote pack howls to the heavens pointing toward the silence. And so it is that the world wants dancing lines that burn like an open Bic Butane singeing a gnarled palm, just pure stimulation, nothing slight or light or delicate, nothing that can be mistaken for old or patient, just blind rushing of syllables from the world’s skin, not a thought in its head. And so it is I stand here dumb and useless in trampled fronds of something green and meaningful, unwilling to make sounds just for the sake of saying I did, letting frogs chorus on, birds shout letters and notes to indifferent air. And so it is that silence is my source and I am blind as bark, and just as bound, to woody phylum root tangles, dirt webs of time and loss, already in the past and future at once and you are wasting your time judging me, already a dream or breeze or storm, just beyond your outstretched hand.
From SOME NOTES YOU HOLD (Madville 2020)
About the Author
Rita Quillen’s most recent poetry book, Some Notes You Hold (Madville 2020) has received a Bronze Medal from the Feathered Quill Book Awards, a finalist listing for poetry in the American Writing Awards, and is a Bonus Book for the 2023 International Pulpwood Queens and Timber Guys Book Club. Her novel, Wayland, published by Iris Press in 2019, is the March 2022 Bonus Book of the Month for the International Pulpwood Queens and Timber Kings Book Club. It is a sequel to her first novel, Hiding Ezra (Little Creek Books, 2014).
Her full-length poetry collection, The Mad Farmer’s Wife, published in 2016 by Texas Review Press, a Texas A & M affiliation, was a finalist for the Weatherford Award in Appalachian Literature from Berea College. One of six semi- finalists for the 2012-14 Poet Laureate of Virginia, she has received three Pushcart nominations, and a Best of the Net nomination in 2012. She lives, farms, writes songs, and takes photographs at Early Autumn Farm in southwestern Virginia. Read more at www.ritasimsquillen.com.
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