Interview - Mennonite Poetry

Leonard Neufeldt

Interview

Bibliography

An E-mail Interview with Leonard Neufeldt

(November 2005)

Leonard Neufeldt: Allow me also to share a few personal thoughts about writing.

Like a serious gardener, musician, or athlete, I as a writer am always learning. This learning is both exciting and humbling. In our writing, most of us merely try to get by with language, as though language is a necessary yet wearisome or bothersome means to our ends. Surely, however, means create or shape ends. What we wish to convey by means of our words is inseparable from our use of language. What I’m referring to at least in part here is the phenomenal resources in language and our willingness or unwillingness to learn to find and use these resources. This observation applies to any kind of writing.

As for poetry, from the time that I began to write poems I’ve always agreed with Robert Frost that poetry is a process of putting this and that together. Sometimes the “this” is ordinary and the “that” is extraordinary. Sometimes both are ordinary but their combination is extraordinary. Whatever the combinations and associations, the result cannot afford to be unremarkable. Poetry is a form of communication among readers with some understanding and feeling for that kind of communication. Poems that fail to capture such a reader’s attention and draw her in, whether now or in future generations, are not entirely inconsequential, however. They linger on as reminders of how easy it is to fail and why other poems by the same author abide as important communications. As I noted earlier, writing poetry is a humbling experience.

I also agree with Frost that writing without rules is like playing tennis without a net. But rules are not necessarily systems of order imposed by tradition. I know that I live in constant tension with rules transmitted by predecessors and for years have enjoyed breaking these rules or ignoring them while also respecting them. Nonetheless, every poet follows rules by developing them (practices, methods, forms, conventions) that readers identify with her work as a whole and with what is called her voice. Moreover, every poem, as it takes shape, develops rules that the author learns to follow. If these rules are not consciously or unconsciously followed once the poem begins to take over, the poem has little chance of succeeding. The wonderful poet Theodore Roethke, whose work mentored me early on, puts it this way is his poem “The Waking”:

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

The result one hopes and writes for is a poem that strongly resists tampering of any kind. In other words, deleting or moving a phrase or dropping a stanza results in a very different poem. Perhaps it still works with such tampering; perhaps it has become bereft. Serious tampering usually means that the poem collapses like a lung that has been punctured.

But the most commonly asked question is “what does one write about?” I write about the world as I have experienced it. The three-fold coming together, as I’ve just noted, is that of the “world” out there, the “I,” and their strong mutual engagement. There is a strong element of neo-realism in my work simply because of my attachments to the world around me. Perhaps this accounts for the political and moral nature and naturalist bent of much of my work.

And now to your questions.

Could you tell us a little about your life and how it influenced your writing?

LN: I was born and raised in the immigrant Mennonite village of Yarrow, located in the upper Fraser Valley of southern British Columbia, at a time when “frontier” referred to the village our parents created and wilderness signified the seemingly endless tracts of mountain forests not more than thirty minutes away by car in several directions. Many of us could tell stories of deer staring into headlights or soaring over the hoods of our cars as we drove at night on the Vedder Mountain Road leading into Yarrow. As children, some of us encountered black bear as we climbed on Vedder Mountain. Down in the Valley, various ducks and geese dotted the fields, especially wetland areas. In my boyhood, the economy of Yarrow depended in large part on two kinds of agriculture, raspberries and hops. My father, a businessman and civic leader in Yarrow, had contracts with the hopyards and owned five acres of raspberries, which my brothers and I managed in large part. I might add that Father was elected and appointed to civic positions mainly because he quickly developed fluency in English, had social and business contacts outside our village, was keen on cultural assimilation, established a successful business, and enjoyed participating in the activities of the Yarrow Mennonite Brethren church, the dominant institution in our village.

Although successful in his business, Father enjoyed music, books, and magazines more than spread sheets. My mother also enjoyed reading. Thus it is not surprising that each week or two we as children brought home armfuls of books from our small public library. But many in our village were surprised when my father decided to sell his partnership in his trucking business and enter college to seek a degree in church music. Mother strongly supported this career change. In my teens, Father taught choral conducting, hymnology, music theory and harmony, and a little music composition in Mennonite Brethren Bible institutes while Mother served occasionally as administrator of a network of women’s sewing and discussion clubs and wished that Father would keep his promise to move the family to a city like Chilliwack or Vancouver.

We made many trips as a family, and all of us enjoyed travel. We were also fanatical sports fans, and our family was evenly divided in its loyalties to the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Mother finally decreed that there would be no discussion of baseball during meals. That was the beginning of five-minute meals in our household.

Our parents assumed that all of their seven children, two daughters and five sons, would go on to college or university, which we did quite matter-of-factly. What we as siblings have found notable in retrospect, however, is that five of us majored in fields related to literature and language and that four of us found our careers in this domain. I might add that all seven of us are avid readers and all of us enjoy reading poetry and hearing it read. My mother, by the way, was one of the best critics of my poems.

What was your Mennonite experience growing up?

LN: More than 90 percent of our villagers were Mennonite immigrant who had fled the USSR or children of these immigrants. The majority of these immigrants had lost most or all of their holdings in the USSR and then suffered economic setbacks in the Canadian Prairies before migrating to BC and settling in Yarrow. These were the people from whom I learned my German (which I can still speak, and which, in my boyhood was the language of our church services and Sunday School), and the hybrid north-Holland/”Mecklenburger” Low German (which I still understand). My parents were regarded as cultural progressives in our largely closed, self-regulating, conservative community. For more detailed information about our community and its religious culture you might wish to consult Before We Were the Land’s, ed. Leonard Neufeldt, Victoria, BC: 2002, pp. 22-42. I believe your college library has one or two copies.

When did you first begin writing poetry?

LN: Although I wrote a few terrible imitations of T.S. Eliot during my undergraduate and graduate studies, I did not really write poetry until after I began to teach at the University of Washington, where the spirit of Theodore Roethke, who had just died, still permeated the place. Former students of Roethke like Carolyn Kiser and Richard Hugo would periodically return, and David Wagoner headed the creative writing program at the time. Each year the English Department brought in a major poet as artist-in residence. For one semester, for example, Elizabeth Bishop occupied the office next to mine. I was told that she was important and I should read her work. When I read some of my work at a departmental poetry reading, Richard Eberhart, who was visiting poet that year, took me aside after the reading and explained that no one would be able to tell if my poems were any good if they couldn’t hear my words. When I began to write poems and publish a few of them, our Department Head reminded me that I had been hired as a literary critic and historian. A few months later, however, he arranged a first meeting between a senior colleague, Arnold Stein, and me and encouraged Stein to give me feedback on my poems. I learned shortly thereafter that Roethke had rarely sent out a poem without Stein’s close examination. Although I did not have the time to write much poetry in these early years in the academe, Stein and I became friends for life. However, when he left for Johns Hopkins I no longer asked him to critique poems I had drafted.

What intrigued you about this creative outlet?

LN: I remember that I was intrigued about writing poetry, but I can’t explain why. It seemed natural to me to pursue both scholarly endeavors and creative work. And I soon discovered that they benefited each other, although the poetry writing probably lent more to my scholarly writing than the latter did to my creative work.

You have written many essays and books on Thoreau and his writing. What interested you in analyzing Thoreau and his work? What about Thoreau was intriguing to you?

LN: At first I was intrigued by Thoreau’s unusual conduct of life. Culturally speaking, he marched to a different drummer (the expression comes from his Walden). Later I became more interested in his moral-aestheticism and in his remarkable talent as a naturalist and bio-centric writer. Eventually I became particularly intrigued about Thoreau as a richly suggestive introduction into the New England culture of his time and its legacies. But I have always admitted that I admire Emerson more than Thoreau, and I have been influenced more by Emerson.

H ow does the writing of Thoreau influence your own writing and teaching? Have Thoreau’s ideals of transcendentalism influenced how you live your life?

LN: From the time that I began to work on Emerson, Thoreau, and other New England writers of their time, I have been keenly interested in nineteenth-century Unitarianism but also in Emerson and Thoreau’s differences with many of their Unitarian acquaintances and friends. Emerson has always struck me as one of the great minds in nineteenth-century American and a “permanently suggestive” figure (to use Jonathan Bishop’s term) in American culture. He was a much more radical thinker than early scholars allowed, and he cast a much greater influence on subsequent American literary developments and traditions than nineteenth-century commentators could have foretold.

Can you recommend any books that have been written about you and your work?

LN: There are no books about me, and so I continue to breathe easily. Numerous reviews of my scholarly works have appeared in various literary and historical journals and other venues over the years, and my work is frequently cited in the work of others. As gratifying as this may have been, and as important a factor as it has been in my professional standing, it has not been a significant factor in my personal life. This kind of attention comes with the territory. I have never kept any record of reviews of my work. Frankly, I think I’ve been very lucky in my career, and I owe much to colleagues throughout the US who have encouraged me and who, for various reasons, have thought well of my work. I’m especially indebted to Lawrence Buell, George Hendrick, Joel Myerson, David Robinson, the late Merton Sealts, and Richard Thompson.

There have been comparatively few reviews of my books of poetry, and most of these reviews are too brief to discuss the poetry in any depth or examine the book being reviewed in the company of my other books of poetry. The most extensive discussion of my poetry is a recently published essay on Raspberrying by Maryann Tjart Jantzen (“Where berries grow and rivers run to seas,” in First Settlers and First Nations, ed. Harvey Neufeldt, et.al., Kitchener, ON, 2004).

We find it interesting that you come from a Russian background, yet you seem to have a particular fondness for German both in your poetry and in you academic endeavors. Could you explain your interest to us?

LN: This is something I’ve never been aware of. German was the church language of Dutch and German Mennonites in Russia, and German literature was one of my five undergraduate minors. I have some familiarity with the history of German poetry, and Paul Celan is still the paramount twentieth-century German poet in my view. But I also admire other European poets, including Cavafy, Mandelstam, Milocz, Pavese, Seferis, and Transtroemer.

What emotions, thoughts, and ideas do you feel you are better able to express through poetry as opposed to other literary outlets such as an essay?

LN: Personal essays have the closest kinship to poetry and textual editing is farthest from poetry. My other kinds of writing fall somewhere between these. But I don’t see one as better than the other, although textual editing allows for the least personal news about transactions with my world and poetry the most.

What is your connection/interest to WW II (as described throughout your poetry in Car Failure North of Nimes)?

LN: Here is another element I had not really considered. But my parents were powerfully anti-Nazi, and I learned to read and write and to figure out maps during the Second World War. As you no doubt know, Canada was in that war from the beginning, and considerably more Canadians (per capita) died in that war than Americans. Several young men in our village, including Mennonite men who had set aside their pacifism or served in the non-combatant medical corps, lost their lives overseas. During the several years that my wife and I later spent in Germany, we were struck by the Germans’ preoccupation with that war and their desire to explain, explain away, or apologize. Perhaps it was our experiences in West Germany, my participation in negotiations with East Germany, our travels in France, and my interviews of a number of Holocaust survivors that has kept World War II very much alive and very real in my mind.

Grace Eidmann & Dara Joy Jaworowicz