Jeff Gundy

Interview

(excerpts from e-mail correspondence, July 2007) 

How did you get started writing poetry?

[excerpt from Gundy's Walker in the Fog, pgs. 29-30]

"When people ask me how I began to write, this is the story I tell: I was at college, away from home for the first time, not desolate but a little lonely and trying to understand what to make of my new life. I met a beautiful woman (and this is the tricky part--every way of telling it is wrong. But these are the phrases that have become habitual) I thought she was really special, and she thought I was really ordinary. I had been turned down often enough before, but this time, impulsively, I went to the bookstore and bought a notebook. I began to try to put words into shapes that would somehow put my longing and desire outside of myself, give them a less tangled and more tangible form. I wrote about other matters as well--I had discovered, as young people do, that the world was unjust, and thought it might be my duty to distribute this discovery to the masses. And all else follows.

"Our one date ended early, awkwardly, at the entrance to her dorm; men were of course not allowed in except on special occasions. 'I guess I'll go read some poetry,' she said. Without planning it, I found myself answering, 'I guess I'll go write some poetry.' She gave me a sudden, surprised look. We said little more except good night, but I could tell she was somehow impressed by my claim to be not merely a consumer of art but a creator, a writer...though insufficiently for my purposes at the time. We drifted apart, she married a nice guy who played soccer, I married a beautiful woman from British Columbia. Surely it was all for the best. I kept writing."

What poets are you interested in right now? Whose work has inspired you in the past?

I've been re-reading Rumi, and Wallace Stevens, who despite his inabilitiy to believe is (I think) one of the great religious poets. I also keep coming back to Mary Oliver and William Stafford and Robert Bly, all of whom have some strong affinities with Mennonites. Among younger poets, Tony Hoagland, Bob Hicok, and Dean Young are doing work that really interests me. So is Brigit Pegeen Kelly and a couple of poets I just discovered, Terrance Hayes and Daisy Freed. There are so many fine poets that I could go on naming names forever.

There's a big emphasis on nature (and environmentalism) in your last two books of poetry. Is this a conscious decision of yours, or something that you just seem to be writing about lately? 

I've always been interested in the natural world, and felt a pretty close connection; way back in college, I used to walk into the woods by the dam and the college cabin to write poems. I believe poetry is an interchange with the world, of which the human is only a small part, and while a particular poem can do many different things, I can't imagine writing a series of poems without their being entangled with the physical world in substantial ways. To put this in other terms, it seems strange to me that so many poets write so much without there being any sense of their inhabiting a world that has trees, animals, free water, and earth in it.

Does your attention to nature have anything to do with your faith?

Yes, the God I believe in is woven into this world, and so poetry (as action) is a way of seeking out the presence of God, of praise, of lament, all the rest.

My favorite poem in Deerflies is "Second Morning Song from Oneonta." Could you share some about the context of that poem? I'm especially interested in your thinking behind the last two lines.

Thanks. I'm partial to that poem myself. I wrote it on top of a big hill during a poetry workshop, and much of it's just my attempt to render what I saw around, looking out over the town below and the hills spreading off in all directions. The whole scene was rather astonishingly beautiful, yet complicated by my knowing that most of the people moving through the morning didn't have the luxury I did of sitting up there writing about it--they were caught in daily lives, bad jobs, all the rest. As for those last lines, that opposition of "don't give up" and "give up" just came to me as I was moving toward some kind of resolution. I kind of hate to try to explain...but both seem necessary somehow. Maybe "don't give up" means don't quit trying to make the world better, don't quit paying attention, don't quit recognizing how much pain and joy and beauty and suffering there is in the world; and "give up" means quit thinking that I'm somehow going to solve or control or finish anything in some absolute way.

I remember now a line from T.S. Eliot, somewhere in Four Quartets, I think: "For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." Maybe that's sort of it.

In Walker in the Fog , you discuss humility in art, and its prophetic possibilities. Many different kinds of poets display a prophetic and humble attitude toward our place in the world, but do you think Mennonite poets are in a unique place to do this?

I think that it's valuable to a poet to have some kind of strong religious/ethical background, even if it's fraught with complications and tensions. The Mennonite tradition gave me the sense that things outside of my pathetic life matter, and that I ought to think about my own problems and ambitions in the context of something much larger. I think that sense of proportion, from which humility and the impulse toward a certain kind of prophecy both grow, is worth a great deal, and while neither is unique to Mennonites, we do have a particular history of both that is worth something.