AH: As a reader, I was intrigued by the formal variety in your new collection of poems, The Opening Ritual (Tupelo Press, 2024), from the first poem—imagistic, lyric, pithy—to poems with long lines, poems with short lines, poems long and short both. How did you go about selecting and arranging the work? Any comments on this variety?
GCW: I’m glad the formal variety worked for you! My arts background is all in music, not in literature—I only took two literature courses in college (both in the novel), so I had to learn to draw creative analogies from my musical training across many years. In the same way that a lengthy piece of music works in part by modulating, by shifts of texture and tone, I want my books to modulate. Some of this tonal modulation is through long and short (long poems vs. short poems, long lines vs. short lines). Some comes from a dialectic with silence.
The poems in The Opening Ritual are thickly-textured, which tends to dull the reader’s sense of silence—although each poem very much emerges from silence for me. At an early point in putting the manuscript together my friend Victoria Chang told me that the longer poems, in their density, were “relentless,” which wasn’t at all my goal—so the long-short alternations had to substitute, somehow, for the dialectic with silence that can’t very well be reproduced in a collection of this sort. Anyway, the ultimate effect is, I hope, a musical effect.
AH: Do you see The Opening Ritual as a new departure for you, a continuation of earlier work/themes, or some combination? For instance, the back cover says that this book "concludes a trilogy of collections exploring chronic illness . . . in the light of faith." What can you tell us about this? Did the prominence of illness and mortality call you to a more embodied poetics as well as a clearer engagement with issues of faith? And if so, how did that emerge for you?
GCW: My previous two collections [The Earliest Witnesses, feast gently] were themed around chronic illness, the failure of the body, this irreducible body—as both a theological (f)act and an aesthetic (f)act. There was a turning point, a turning away from that, or perhaps a turning through or into that: namely “Watching the Flower-Arrangers in Ripon Cathedral.” We think a great deal about healing in Christianity: the healing trope is a New Testament trope, and there’s a reason one of Christ’s many names is Paraclete. But in 2019 I found “healing” problematic. It seemed I would “recover” from my not-quite-Parkinson’s debacle, as I had from cancer in 2005: but I would recover with damage. The organs that were lifted from my body in 2005 during my cancer crisis were not coming back, not in this life, and much of the nerve damage I incurred from a form of pernicious anemia in 2010-15 proved permanent. As far as the cancer went, I was clear; as far as the pernicious anemia, after three nightmarish years I’d found an accurate diagnosis as well as effective treatment. I was functional. But “healed” is not the same thing as “whole.” I would never be whole again.
This isn’t a new thought: millions of people, including Christians, ponder something like this every day, from inside their faith or outside it, or from no faith at all, always from within their compromised bodies. But from inside the cosmology of Christianity, separating “healing” from “wholeness,” from personhood itself, proved . . . difficult. Emotionally as well as intellectually.
The moment in Ripon Cathedral memorialized in the poem was a realization that it might not be mercy that was lacking from my life: this—this compromised body; indeed, in the wake of the nerve damage, this compromised mind—might actually be mercy. This might be what mercy looks like. Or at least one of the faces mercy consents to show, among women and men.
I had not thought I was working on a “trilogy” of collections until I was over halfway through writing the poems in The Opening Ritual, but as I shuffled and added to the manuscript I became more and more convinced that this was the third volume in a notional trilogy. So often I’m the last one to know what I’m doing. Or, one comes to know through the doing.
AH: Spirituality, place, and the breath are predominant preoccupations in this collection. In fact, you seem much freer with topics of faith in this book than in your earlier ones. Any comments on that?
GCW: I’ve never written any poetry outside of my faith. My first lines of poetry came in 1994, just after I made a Christian commitment; I’ve spoken of this elsewhere, but for me poetry always begins as a sign gift, what I take as a sign gift. I’m thankful, and I’ve always tried to write from within that gift-space (although looking back there are poems I would retrieve if I could).
A decade or more ago, a poet-friend (of mine) was speaking with another poet-friend (of his, not mine) and my name came up as an example of a contemporary “Christian poet.” My friend’s friend, who had championed certain kinds of Christian poetry, responded with surprise: “Oh! Is Waldrep a Christian? I wouldn’t have known it from the poems.” Which made me think that my friend’s friend…wasn’t a very good reader? But it was a bracing exchange to hear about, after the fact. And I do see a turn in my work with feast gently. Another poet-friend of mine, an atheist, told me very seriously after he read feast gently in manuscript that “You know I’m not a Christian. And I’ve always been able to read your poems with pleasure, without reference to your faith, without thinking of that at all. But this is the first book when I’ve had to reckon with your faith on your faith’s terms. And I don’t like it.”
There was a turn in the broader poetry culture from poetry as a site where spiritualities (including but not limited to Christianity) could and should be evoked and explored to where we are now, where Christ can only be invoked in an ironic or condemnatory way. (I realize there are some very good reasons for this in North America, mostly involving the Evangelical right’s political entanglements.) During my closing years as a literary editor I read reams of what Flannery O’Connor might have called Christ-haunted poetry, poetry in which Christianity figured as a field of allusion, a ground for reaction, or a cause of trauma—but almost no unironic, belief-guided poetry. Then again, “Christian poetry” has come to be defined by the explicitly devotional, which my poetry isn’t always, or not in conventionally recognizable ways.
I can’t say I had any goal in writing these more recent poems, individually. At the level of the book, yes, there’s an arc of grappling with chronic illness and diminishment in terms of faith, and vice versa. But at the level of publication, I’ve always hoped that my poems would lead readers from a variety of faith positions—or no faith position at all—into a place of imaginative possibility. Think of it perhaps as a clearing in a forest, where some things (including some new things, some surprising things, perhaps some terrifying things) might be possible. This is what I myself look for in other people’s poems, whether or not the poets counted themselves Christian.
The New Testament admonishes against “vain imaginations” (Acts 4:25, Romans 1:21). But what about the other kinds of imagination, the non-vain kinds? It’s heartening to remember just how central metaphor is to Christ’s preaching and parables. It takes an act of metaphor—a transubstantive act—to believe that Christ was simultaneously fully man and fully God.
Metaphor in poetry participates in this, in the triangulation between the apprehensible, sensual reality and the other realities, all of which God speaks through.
AH: There's a strong sense of place, or the identity and integrity of specific places, in this book. This is something I really began to notice in your work when I reviewed Disclamor, and the chapbook it incorporates, The Batteries. In fact, a few years after doing that review I had the opportunity to spend a week in San Francisco and took a pilgrimage to the Batteries because of your poems. Can you speak to the emphasis on place in several groupings of the poems in The Opening Ritual as Acadia National Park, Arrow Rock, The Bloedel Reserve, and Ripon Cathedral, etc.?
GCW: I’ve always been place-focused. I want to blame this on growing up in the rural South, but even when I was a small child my family and friends thought the attention I lavished on place—especially places we were traveling through (on family trips)—was excessive. I would commandeer the road atlas on family trips and tick off the towns we drove through, asking my parents questions about them, their history, who lived there. When I was working on The Batteries, in 2003, I had a residency at Golden Gate National Recreational Area, which in earlier use had been a military base: the buildings of which were often covered with graffiti. That was my point of entry into that landscape: if you could write, and post, anything, anything at all, in a national park, that used to be a military base, overlooking a great city and the sea, what would you write, or post?? It seems like a Zen question, but the site evidence was real. I copied down pages and pages of graffiti before the poems began taking shape, as poems.
When I first had an inkling of The Opening Ritual as a book—with about 2/3 of the poems written—I was sure this was my “national park book” and that the central theme was public access to land, the human body in the public landscape. (This was before I thought of it as the third volume of a notional trilogy about chronic illness. Also without the graffiti emphasis.) But when I showed the poems to some close reader-friends, they didn’t get this, and when I explained my thinking, they (especially my friend Dana Levin) really didn’t get it, which forced me to reconsider. Some poems exited the manuscript, and others entered.
I was blessed to have an Artist-in-Residence position at Acadia National Park in 2019 and a residency at the Bloedel Reserve in 2020. Arrow Rock was different: I’d studied the history of that all-but-ghost-town in depth in the 1990s (for a historical project that never panned out) but had never been there. After a planned fellowship in the UK was canceled, because of the pandemic, I thought why not and drove to Arrow Rock instead. (Brownville, Neraska and Effigy Mounds National Monument were on that same trip.)
In Anabaptist Christianity we don’t much go for pilgrimages, but I have always been interested in pilgrimage in terms of the faith-journey—on the ground, in real time and space, and not just my faith-journey, but others’ too. There’s always Eliot’s irreducible insistence that “You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid” (from “Little Gidding”).
As for Ripon, the town and cathedral were supposed to be a quick, prefatory stop on my way to Fountains Abbey. But obviously something happened, something unexpected. That’s the thing about travel, as Anne Carson et al. have pointed out: the unexpected.
AH: Related to the experience of encountering new places is the trope of photography or description/representation. In "Deposition" you describe a sketch of a woman above the altar and then begin to photograph it and other objects. You write: "I would never photograph another person, I mean a breathing human being, but I document the arrangements of absence." In "Houses Built from the Bodies of Lions or Dogs" you discourse on photography at some length. " . . . we are so tired of hearing about photography in poems./ It has become the 20th century equivalent of the soul (in poems) only now it's the 21st." I'm curious about the way the art of photography recurs in this book. I'm also aware that you use a picture of a hat for your author photo, when one is required. Could you say a bit more about the relationship of photography, the image, and the soul -- or anything else that comes to mind?
GCW: That’s such a good question! I tend towards the traditionalist side of my Old Order Christian faith, and that has always meant no photographs (of me). Perhaps because of this I’ve had a heightened sense of how photographs work, on their own and in poems, for many years. I think the key to this may be Anne Carson’s Camino del Santiago poem-essay, “Kinds of Water.” It’s structured as a travel journal, and a recurring motif is Carson referencing photographs (from her pilgrimage) that don’t actually exist—sometimes as if they did exist, sometimes admitting they’re imaginary. She’s messing with the reader, a bit—evoking imaginary photographs, sometimes describing “photographs” of things that could never be photographed.
A photograph is a frame, or a cage: a way of capturing an image to save it, preserve it. In my early years as a poet (late 1990s, when I was living in an Amish community in North Carolina), reading a lot of William Stafford, that was my idea about poems, too. The poem existed to frame and/or capture the moment, a lyric moment of perception, of apprehension. Without the poem (or photograph) that moment would be irretrievably lost. But as it turns out that’s only one thing a poem can do—they can enact as well as contain. And they can address.
The poetic texts of Scripture, and of the hymns of the church, enact and address more than they fix or preserve.
AH: For someone who had only two English courses in college, you have an amazing repertoire of writers, especially poets, in your lexicon. Of course you got a MFA at Iowa after your PhD in history, which must have stimulated more reading. Besides publishing at least eight books of poems, you’ve collaborated on editing projects with Ilya Kaminsky (someone I’ve studied with multiple times) and others. Which writers, past and present, would you name as your muses or sources of inspiration, or sources of imagined or real conversation? And why?
GCW: It depends on the moment, doesn’t it, which writers go with you? And which stay with you: some stay for a few enthusiastic weeks or months or years, some stay a decade or two but eventually fall away, some fall away and then return, some are life companions.
Robert Penn Warren was my “first poet,” but I haven’t read him in many years now. Milosz was my second, and he remains very important to me. Some of the poets on my “essential” shelf include Wallace Stevens, Aime Cesaire, Rene Char, Paul Celan, Geoffrey Hill, Raul Zurita, Gennady Aygi, R.S. Thomas, Mahmoud Darwish, Adonis, and Friederike Mayrocker. Plath, Oppen, Eliot. In terms of contemporary American poets, Carl Phillips, Brenda Hillman, Cole Swensen have been important to me, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly is always part of my mental furniture. Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop, Gustaf Sobin, John Taggart, Tim Lilburn. Anne Carson. Also the contemporary British poets Peter Riley, Alice Oswald, and Peter Larkin. I think right now Char and Celan are the brightest stars in my poetry-sky.
Gertrude Stein was very, very important to me for over a decade, but there’s a stasis in Stein that’s hard to move forward with, or through. William Carlos Williams was also very important for more or less that same decade-plus, but I can’t imagine re-devoting myself to his work now, to the same degree or in the same way. The same for Vasko Popa and some other poets, Jose Kozer, Yang Lian, Miroslav Holub, all of whom were blazing lights for me at different points. The Surrealists have been very important to me, although perhaps not right now. (It’s one of the less-appreciated aspects of both Dada and Surrealism: the way some of their agents and vectors emerge from Christianity, and some even point back into it.)
But on a different day in a different month or year this constellation might appear different to me. Why didn’t I just add C.D. Wright, or Alice Notley, or Donald Revell?
And that’s just poetry. In my youth I so desperately wanted to be a novelist. It would be hard—impossible—to overstate how much Faulkner meant to me in my teens and twenties. (And my inability to write in his shadow is probably why I’m not a novelist.) It would be difficult to overstate how much Flannery O’Connor (her essays especially) stands behind my thinking about what a Christian artist’s vocation is or could or should be.
It’s a mysterious thing, when a new poet comes into your life and you suddenly find yourself, and your work, joined, companioned. Has this been your experience at all?
AH: Yes, indeed. It’s like rediscovering through the window of a particular poem or writer that through poetry we are part of a large, extended community. More than that, such a poem can articulate, or maybe illuminate, a part of your own being that was lying in shadow. By delving into your work for this interview, I’ve found that kind of deep companionship. In particular, I’m drawn to the ways in which your work represents the state of inspiration, its mystery and its musicality.