Ellen Bass is an author of poetry, non-fiction, and children’s literature, and the co-editor of the first major anthology of women’s poetry. She has established poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, CA jails, and she teaches in the low-res MFA program at Pacific University.

Before Ellen’s visit to Oregon State, 45th Parallel Poetry Editor Ben Swimm and Managing Editor Jenna Noska talked with her about gratitude, God, sex, and the purpose of poetry.

Ben Swimm: We were struck by how much gratitude and praise the poems in your latest book, Like a Beggar, contain. Why do you write about gratitude, and why do you think it is important to do so?

Ellen Bass: It took me seven years to write the book, and a lot of that time was a very difficult personal time in my life. When I looked at the poems and saw there were all of these odes, I thought it was really strange. How does this happen, that during maybe the most difficult time of my life, I was writing all these odes? Then I thought, well, maybe that really makes sense. When things are painful we have to look for ways to give ourself strength and nourishment and really appreciate what there is to appreciate. I didn’t realize what I was doing at the time, but with hindsight I can see that I was making an antidote to what I was experiencing.

Jenna Noska: Since that recognition, has gratitude been an intentional practice for you or is it something that seems to come naturally?

EB: It’s always been there to some extent in my poetry. I think that’s part of the draw for me. Part of the reason I wanted to write poetry in the first place was to try to think more deeply about gratitude and appreciation and simply attention―noticing, not sleepwalking through my life. Like many people, it does not come naturally to me to be in the moment, to be full of gratitude. So poetry is a practice that helps me do that, because you can’t really write a poem unless you stop and pay attention and slow things down and take a good look.

Also, there is something a little magical to me about the word “ode.” I’ve found that when I look at the blank page and don’t quite know how to enter into the poem, if I write “ode to” at the top of the page, all of a sudden it seems like there is a door, an angle through which I can enter. Somehow things focus differently.

BS: I like that, too, the acknowledgement of praise suddenly opening a door. 

JN: Yeah, you’re talking about a link between gratitude and awareness, how noticing breeds or somehow is part of the same thing as gratitude…

EB: I think that’s true. Many people have written about that process of paying attention―artists and practitioners of different spiritual traditions―about the way in which really paying attention is a most elemental kind of prayer. I believe that that’s true. 

Another thing that I could mention about the odes is that I like writing odes to things people might not ordinarily think are great. I’m working on a poem now―I’m not sure how it will turn out―called “Ode to Fat.” Ninety-nine point nine percent of the culture is very critical of fat; in our culture it’s so stigmatized except for a small movement of positiveness, so I’m really having a good time working on an ode to it.

BS: In an interview with Rattle a few years ago you mentioned that one big question poets are trying to answer is how humans must change in order to sustain life on the planet. Can you talk about how poetry helps us do this?

EB: It’s really hard to take in a poem while racing through your life. So the first thing a poem asks of us is just to stop for a moment. Hopefully a poem can point in these moments to something that is precious or has intrinsic value, whether it’s a person or a part of nature or art or a building. Poetry says, Look at this! It says, Look at how beautiful this is. And sometimes it says, Look how terrible this is. But it always says, Take a look! I think that when you read a great poem you’re transformed in some way. And when you write a poem, even if you don’t think it’s great, if you are getting at the heart of something, you’re transformed in some way. This transformation in our way of thinking is what we have to do evolutionarily in order to move into a better place in terms of the environment and in terms of how people treat each other. I don’t believe that poetry on its own is going to save us, but it is a part of connecting us with what is truly important to us. Poetry, like many of the arts, reminds us what our real values are. 

BS: Another part I really enjoyed about your interview with Rattle was when you talked about giving other people this opportunity to stop and look. You talked about finding poems a friend or family member might connect to, and then calling them and asking them to sit and listen. Many people view poetry as inaccessible, and I thought it was a wonderful idea to try to connect people with poetry by choosing specific poems with them in mind. 

EB: Viewing ourselves as poetry ambassadors is a really great thing that we can do. People who are not naturally readers of poetry often take it in best one poem at a time. It’s great to give someone a whole book, but when I do, I say “Read this one!” 

I also love reading poems to people because it changes the speed of a poem. Grace Paley wrote about “the slow ear,” and “the speedy eye.” There’s a way in which we read so quickly, especially those of us who read a lot. But you can’t hear quickly. When I work with my own poems and when I read poems that I care about, I read them aloud a lot because poetry is oral. As much as we read it silently and appreciate it silently, it really lives orally. I love reading a poem to somebody that I think they’ll appreciate, and I love when somebody does that for me: “Here. Stop. Just listen.”

Something struck me recently about one of Mark Doty’s poems that I love called Mercy on Broadway. I’ve read it to myself a million times, and taught it a number of times. I never realized until I was in a class very recently and I read it out loud– I’m just gonna look for it here so I can get it right–it says–I haven’t found it yet but I will–it says “our hour.” And somebody in the class said “Look at that! It’s the same word out loud!” And it was just like “Oh my god.” The last line is “our miracle broadway, our hour.” It’s so brilliant and yet I had never heard it. I had never slowed down enough to hear it. I love that in a great poem, no matter how many times you read it, each time there’s something new.

JN: Do you have a definition for or way of thinking about what writing is that helps you understand your place in the world?

EB: I don’t know if I have a definition, but when I started writing I was in some ways trying to make sense of my own experience, to better understand my place in the world, like you said. That continues, but maybe the flavor of it is a little different now, or the slant a little different. It’s less trying to see how to say something in a true way that is personal to me. It’s become more looking at my experience and consciously thinking about it as connected to the human experience. I think you know I use very personal elements from my own experience, but I’m more aware now that I’m using them as a way to talk about all of our experiences. I use the details from my life because those are what I have.

I guess the other side of the coin is that I think I’m always trying to do two things. One is this appreciation and paying attention that we talked about. The other is trying to in some way transform how I see an experience so that those types of changes we also started to talk about take place in me. Then I can hold an experience differently. Things happen to you and they’re painful or challenging or distressing in some way, and you have to figure out how to hold them in a way that allows a little bit more equanimity. I want to know how I can see a troubling moment, how I can not resist it so much, how I can not fight against what’s happening. I don’t think I’m very good at it. I don’t think I’m any better at that than the average person. But within the frame of the poem I am more able to do that, which gives me more of an ability to do it in my life. I find that my poems are way ahead of me in terms that their ability to not resist the life that is mine. So that’s their main purpose, really. You know, to get me through the night.

JN: That’s a pretty incredible way of putting it, that your poems are ahead of you. Like they’re the tool you’re using to dig through the chasm of life.

EB: Yes, exactly. They’re definitely ahead of me. And the poems that sound like they’re giving advice to other people, like the first poem in Like a Beggar, “Relax,”  I’m talking to myself, of course. The poem says “Relax. Bad things are going to happen.”  Do I relax? No, no, no. I’m not that evolved. But I encounter something in my life, and I look at that poem and I say “You wrote this poem, Ellen, and you should listen to it. It’s giving you some good advice.”

JN: I want to know more about your relationship with the God of Atheists.

EB: So this paradoxical idea that atheists could have a God―I mean, it’s not really logical. It doesn’t exactly make sense―but it just kind of came to me and helped me to explore some of the things that the gods of some religions impose upon people in juxtaposition to the natural world―you know, that the plums are going to bloom whether you believe in God or not. When I say the God of Atheists isn’t going to reward you, I’m trying to express my own personal irritations with certain things that people say around religion, things people only say when certain things happen. When somebody has a sick child, for example, and they pray to God that the child is made well, and the child is made well they might say, “Great, I’m rewarded.” But how about the person who loves their child just as much and that child dies? I think that’s just kind of crazy. And when people see things like the synchronicities in the world, and think they happen as a reward from God. You know, the cliche of it is the Parking Space God, where you pray that you get the parking space and then, you know, there it is, right there, how wonderful!  Those things irritate me because I don’t see the world operating that way. 

I guess every atheist would have a different type of God, but my kind of God of Atheists is in the natural world, so that is what I was trying to explore in this poem. When I say at the end of the poem, “This God loves the virus as much as the child,” I’m trying to say that the virus, as horrible as it is to us when we’re struck by it or our child is struck by it, from the big picture it’s just another life form. It’s a kind of marvelous and terrible truth. When we look at the whole cosmos, I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around both how large and how small it goes. So the poem helped me step out of the usual perspective I walk through my life with, which is thinking about myself and those close to me. It was a very satisfying poem for me to write, because I was able to talk about some of those things without sounding like I was hammering at somebody else’s beliefs.

JN: Thinking more about things that are close to you, I’m wondering what writing about sex allows you to get at or see?  

EB: In some ways it’s at the center of life, because it’s how life reproduces. Even if you’re not having sex for reproduction, the hard wiring of how primal it is is built into us. So I think sex is just so powerful, and that makes it interesting in life and it also makes it really interesting in writing.

The other thing that I think I bring to it is that I really hate the way sex has been so badly handled from so many angles. The commercialization of sex, the damnation of sex by so many religions, the sexual abuse, the subjugation of women and children. There are so many ways in which this very central thing to us as humans and as animals, has been twisted.

One of the things I see as just a little personal mission is to focus on the the joyousness and goodness of sex. I love when I can make a poem where sex is presented in a way that I think is underrepresented in our lives. In my book Mules of Love I talk about the father of a friend of mine who, in his eighties, after terrible losses in his life―his wife dies, his daughter dies of cancer, his son is quadriplegic, I mean his life is just smashed to smithereens―he meets this woman and they just start having constant sex, and forming this marvelous sexual relationship. It just seemed to me like the most beautiful thing, that this man whose life had been crushed now had this beauty in his life. But that’s not the kind of story we see in our culture. So that poem was just pure pleasure for me to write. I want that to be in the culture. And as a lesbian I feel like I’m able to do this if I just write about my own marriage and sexual relationship the way I would if there were no stigmas. It comes very naturally to me not to think about what other people will think when they read it. I don’t have to work hard to do that. 

BS: What are you currently looking forward to working on?

EB: As part of my coming up to Oregon I’m going to get to spend a week at the Andrew’s Experimental Forest. I am so excited about it. I hope I can get a lot of writing done, putting a lot of words on the page at least. That’s how I try and really look at it. I have a little office in the garage and I’ll come into the house and Janet, my wife, will ask, “How’d it go?” and I almost always say “You know, I got words on the page,” because that’s just how I try to think about it. I try not to get too into “It’s good, it’s bad,” because I know after all of these years that something about my own process, which is that I do a lot of writing which is not ultimately very interesting for the writing that turns out to be my personal best. So, you know, if I’m writing a lot, then the odds are I’m going to get some poems, and if I am not writing then I am not going to. 

I try to say to myself, “Look, Ellen, don’t get too worked up about it, you’ve been at this a lot of years and you sort of know how it goes. It takes you a long time. You have to write a lot that’s not that good, and also work really hard on a few poems that turn out to not be very good.” And then, you know, one will just almost come as a gift. So i just kind of stick with it. But I am very excited for this week coming up.  To have nothing to do except be interested in what’s going on in this forest. 

BS: Is there something you know you need to write about that you haven’t found a way yet?

EB: Yeah. Yeah, I really feel like I need to write something about some aspects of the political situation that we’re in. And those are the hardest poems for me to write, I think. Finding a way in is really challenging because the issues are so big.

JN: Have you tried your ‘ode’ strategy?

EB: That’s a very clever idea. I’m going to keep it in mind. I’m hoping that something comes. Poems that speak to social or political issues are so important for poets to grapple with. But hard. For me, hard. But I’ve been working on something. I don’t feel like I’m over the hump with it yet. We’ll see if it turns out to be anything.