Meet Heather Treseler

Home / Meet Heather Treseler

Q&A with Heather Treseler

Q: You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that there’s a balance of effort and ease in writing poetry. Were certain poems in Auguries & Divinations harder to write than others? Did you learn anything while writing this book that surprised you?

A: I worked on this book for 8 years, and it was full of surprises. When I sit down to write, I might have a line, a sound, or an image in my head—the spur of the poem—but I never know where it will end up or how it will take shape on the page. Of the 39 poems in the book, each went through many drafts—some dozens. I was trying to make each poem as whole as I could, balancing story, sound, and the sculptural look on the page.

At some point, I realized that the book had four sections, and that it tracked a young woman’s coming of age in New England. The first section is about childhood and initiation into the theater of adulthood. The second section, which is just two poems set in St. Louis, “The Lucie Odes” and “Factories at Clichy,” concerns a transformative love, one that served as an education. The third section looks at patterns in women’s lives (and the lives of birds) and the ways in which women’s capacities—to produce, reproduce, affiliate, and compete—are culturally understood. The fourth section is about claiming a life with artistry, eros, and friendship at its core.

 

Q: Do you have a favorite poem in Auguries & Divinations?

A: My friend Lloyd Schwartz called up some of his friends during the acute phase of the pandemic and read them “Cul-de-sac” and “Wildlife” over the phone. That delighted me: that Lloyd would do that, and that those poems surprised and pleased others.

“Chase Street,” “Louisiana Requiem,” and “After Catullus” felt like breakthroughs: they are all love poems, but of different stripes.

 

Q: You reference English and Latin grammar in a few poems, such as in the lines: “in those years that other people’s lives / (and cable television) split my infinitives into participles / of unknowing” in the poem “The Sitter” and “falling asleep in the riddle / of an ablative absolute” in the poem “Parturition.” I know you are an English professor, but where did this interest language begin?

A: Poets, like pipefitters, have to know their way around grammar and syntax.

My father’s first profession was as a high school English teacher, and my mother is an avid gatherer of stories, so I grew up surrounded by books and anecdotes. I was obsessed with language from an early age: it seemed like a “code or augury to read and remember,” a way of arresting reality, at least for a moment.

 

Q: It took me hours to read “The Lucie Odes.” The raw emotion in each ode often took my breath away. What a beautiful immortalization of someone who meant a great deal to you. I am curious about what it means for you to have such a personal account published. These odes felt like diary entries or love letters. How did you decide to share this with the public?

A: “The Lucie Odes” draw from the life of Lucie Nell Beaudet (1960-2018). I knew and loved Lucie for just over a decade and in one of our last visits, she gave me explicit permission to write about her life. She was proud of what she had survived and, even more, of the life she had built, working as an electron microscopist at a medical school; living independently, even after a car accident necessitated use of a wheelchair; and convening a lively salon, which included artists, scientists, Joycean scholars, an Olympic-level gymnast, a nephrologist, a flight attendant, and a former felon. Her dinner parties were never dull.

I wrote the odes in the ten months after Lucie died; outside of work, I almost couldn’t do anything else. I was desperate to continue our conversation, which had sustained me. Poems are the only way I know how to talk to the dead.

 

Q: You write about Anne Sexton throughout the collection. When did this fascination with her begin?

A: When I was ten, my family moved from a triple-decker in Hyde Park, a section of Boston, to a Victorian house in Newton, Massachusetts. My parents had bought a fixer-upper, and they involved us four kids in its renovation. It was an adventure; there were birds nesting inside of the walls, bamboo thickets in the backyard, a giant smoky stove in the kitchen, and floods in the cellar. We spent the first few months getting the wildlife out of the house. The fire department came one morning, when the ancient furnace burst: they walked right through the kitchen with their hoses and axes, while we calmly ate breakfast cereal in our snow suits.

In those years, my parents were working very hard—often 14 to 16 hours a day. They were trying to move from one socioeconomic class and establish a toehold in another. Like most parents, they wanted to provide their kids with opportunities. We worked alongside them.

But initially Newton felt like a strange planet. As a bookish kid, I went to the library and asked if there were any “interesting writers from Newton.” A kind librarian steered me toward Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, two Pulitzer Prize winning poets who had begun their writing careers in the ‘50s and ‘60s while raising their children in Newton. Sexton and Kumin became close friends despite being quite different temperamentally. Sexton had worked as a fashion model and secretary; Kumin had two degrees from Radcliffe. But they were both up against a literary establishment that did not take women writers seriously, and they provided each other with essential support.

Although Sexton didn’t have as much formal education as Kumin, she mastered the musicality of language and brought extraordinary resources—of imagination, rigor, and honest daring—to her poems. She wasn’t afraid to write about sexual hunger, about the constraints on women’s lives, and about previously taboo subjects such as menstruation, mental illness, medical bias, ambivalent motherhood, aging, and non-monogamy.

As a newcomer (and outsider) in an upper middle-class suburb and as one of the neighborhood babysitters, I was becoming aware of what was hidden behind the facades of seemingly perfect lives. Sexton and Kumin had been there before me, and they had seen aspects of what I was noting, including the narrow spaces for women with artistic ambition.

 

Q: What was the process of entering your manuscript into the May Sarton New Hampshire poetry contest? 

A: This manuscript had been a finalist (or semi-finalist) in about 12 book contests. Last summer, it felt as though the manuscript was truly done: I couldn’t imagine anything new for it. So, I sent it off. I’m so grateful that Brad Crenshaw chose it.

 

Q: What are you reading right now, and what would you recommend?

A: I’m rereading Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Age of Phillis, which imagines Phillis Wheatley’s life and kidnapping vividly, drawing on years of archival research; I taught it last year and had to return to it. I’m also reading (as advance reader copies) Alice Notley’s Being Reflected Upon and April Gibson’s The Span of a Small Forever: two forthcoming poetry collections that deal with living with debility and the deep pleasures of place.

 

Q: Is there anything that you’re working on right now?

A: I’m finishing edits on Hard Bargain, a chapbook of poems that will be published by Lily Poetry Review later this year. It’s a collection that explores the ways in which women—in myth, visual art, and private life—find ways of surviving patriarchy in their public, professional, and intimate lives. So, Leda from W. B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” returns to have it out with Zeus-disguised-as-a-bird; the courtesan in Edouard Manet’s Olympia takes stock of her business; Demeter reckons with Persephone’s rollicking sex life; and a young mother takes her infant to visit her father, sobering up in a rehab facility, and demands that he stay on the wagon if he wants to know his granddaughter. It’s about women asserting authority, street smarts, and caritas to make their lives habitable.

I’m also writing an essay about poetry and hiding places, and I’m working on my next full-length manuscript of poems.

 

 

 

 

 

© 2024 / All Rights Reserved