and a teacher, the spiritual aspects of her poetry,
and influences on her work.
Q: You see poetry as a calling. How would you
distinguish your sense of calling from that of some
of the poets you admire? And how does that sense
of calling relate to your apprehension of transcen-
dence, your commitment to a spiritual vision?
A:I’ve always, since I was a young girl, felt
some kind of affinity for Keats’ feeling that he
wanted to be great, he wanted to be numbered
among the English poets. He was not ambitious
in the here and now. He wasn’t a careerist. He
really wanted to be apoet; not to ‘‘have a career.’’
And of course he was hurt when he got those
horrible reviews; he was sensitive, and they were
so nasty, referring to the Cockney accent and
things like that. But it wasn’t immediate recogni-
tion but posthumous fame that he really sought.
So, my concept of fame: I didn’t want to be
mediocre. I wanted to try to be, I hoped I could
be, first rate. But I never have been a careerist,
and I’ve been a very fortunate person in being
sort of discovered by various people, especially
when I was so young, and I have had a very lucky
publishing career and a lot of success and pos-
itive feedback. But I truly have not sought it. I
have never gone after a job and never made a
move that’s supposed to be to my own advant-
age. These sort of dropped out of a tree into my
own hand.
Q: So I take it that you didn’t seek a career in
teaching?
A:I sort of happened into teaching. I found
I was quite good at that. Not first rate, but good.
So I can’t really picture myself being anything
else than a poet. I did want to be a painter, but I
didn’t have the drive to go on with that. You
have to want to paint more than anything. I
didn’t have that much talent anyway—only a
little bit. My mother had a definite talent for
art, and my son is a painter. So it’s somewhere
in the family. But I didn’t feel the inner need to
pursue it.
I used to draw from time to time, and then
when my son went to art school, I stopped
entirely, because he also wrote, and I thought it
was probably really hard for him to have two
parents who were writers. I thought that I didn’t
want him to feel he was in competition with me
in the visual arts; so I stopped and didn’t even
miss doing it. I wasn’t drawing or trying to paint
that regularly anyway. But I can’t stop writing
poetry. I don’t write every day, but it’s some-
thing that my inner being needs to go on doing,
and if I haven’t written any poems for months,
which sometimes happens, I don’t feel right. I
feel uncomfortable in my skin somehow.
To go back to the other part of your initial
question: I’m not sure what an ‘‘apprehension of
transcendence’’ means, to tell you the truth. I
would say that I do believe that anybody who
has any kind of gift, and has been given that gift,
has an obligation to use it. And it’s really hard to
have a gift. When I stopped being an agnostic
I perceived it [the calling] as a gift from God.
What I thought it was in the interim I don’t
know, I thought it was a gift anyway, a gift
from something somewhere.
Q: I guess by ‘‘apprehension of transcen-
dence,’’ I meant that your poetry—even some of
the earliest—has a spiritual dimension, a sense of
reality, something beyond our own capabilities.
A:Of course, although I was agnostic for
years. I did grow up in a quite definitely religious
atmosphere. And so that concept, certainly, was
imparted to me in my earliest years, and I’ve
always believed in other orders of being. When
I was a child, I saw a little man, you know, one of
the little people, and the dog saw it too. I was
with my sister—I can’t remember if she saw it
too. Actually, I think she did, she must have. I
was sitting on a bench in this old park—I mean
‘‘park’’ in the English sense, not the American
sense—in the woods, and there was a bench, and
a flat, wide walk, which had an edging to mark
where the path was and where the woods were;
which was like a wire strung between low
uprights. And a little dinky person, less than
two feet high, dressed in a one-piece garment
and a little peaked cap came out of the woods.
He was so small that to get over that wire he had
toclimbover it. He crossed the path without aI WOULD SAY THAT I DO BELIEVE THAT
ANYBODY WHO HAS ANY KIND OF GIFT, AND HASBEEN GIVEN THAT GIFT, HAS AN OBLIGATION TO USE
IT. AND IT’S REALLY HARD TO HAVE A GIFT.’’ATreeTellingofOrpheus