Susan McCaslin talks to Sharon Berg about her new collection of poems.
1. You begin the book with poems that reference Hildegard of Bingen, who is known as the Sybil of the Rhine of and a Benedictine abbess who rallied for the natural world, its viriditas or the ‘greening power’ of its processes, and the divinity of the flora and fauna. She wrote many books, composed music and plays, was an herbalist and healer, and spoke out as a woman against the follies of humankind at a time when women were not permitted to make speeches. Can you speak to what in particular drew you to focus on Hildegard? Was it a certain part of her mission that inspired this collection of poems? Or was it everything that she stood for?
I first discovered Hildegard’s work through books on her by the mystical theologian Matthew Fox in 1985 and was initially drawn to her stunning visual illuminations in the shape of mandalas based on her visions. Later I read Scivias, her book of visions, listened to her musical compositions written for her morality play sung in plainchant, and discovered her medical works on herbal remedies. I was impressed to learn that a Benedictine nun living in the 12th century attained recognition as a visionary, composer, healer, scientist, and artist in a period when women were marginalized. She achieved autonomy as abbess of her order and spoke truth to power, gaining even the approval of the Pope of her time. In the opening section of Heart Work, “Songs for Hildegard,”I chose to focus on her mandalas, which her fellow nuns are believed to have painted under her direction. The cover image of my book is a replication of Panel 9 from an exhibition by a local BC artist, Betty Spackman titled “A Creature Chronicle,” which contains two of Hildegard’s mandalas. Two of the opening poems are ekphrastic poems based on this panel. I see all aspects of Hildegard’s life and creativity as interconnected because of her affirmation of the unity of the earth (through its viriditas or greening power), humans, non-human creatures, and the vaster cosmos. Her worldview celebrates the interbeing of all things and is therefore pertinent to this time of global crisis. The title of the last poem in the Hildegard sequence, echoes the book’s title “Heart Work,” and therefore sets up the central theme of the collection.
2. Your second section focuses on Keats and his letters, which (as you say) are like poetry hidden in prose, followed by your own poetic response. One quickly sees your admiration for his views and your inspiration in responding. Did you begin the series on Keats with the idea of creating a series of ‘call and response’ pieces? Or did that simply unfold as you worked?
My first encounter with the poetry of John Keats was in high school and I studied his work in university and grad school when I read his poems in more depth, a major biography by Walter Jackson Bate, and selections from Keats’ letters. I was always struck by his timeless “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “To Autumn,” but more recently turned to a deeper reading of his collected letters. As you suggest, when reading his letters slowly and in depth, I noticed places where his prose bursts into poetry. I began to see poetic gems strewn throughout the letters and set these up as the epigraphs for each poem to which my poem was a response. What touched me most about Keats was how much he accomplished in his brief life of only 25 years. Now at the age of 75 I stand in awe of him even more than I did in my early twenties. His words about entering a sparrow’s existence, for instance, ties to my desire to join Keats by giving full attention to the birds at my feeder. When he writes of “that trembling delicate and Snail-horn perception of beauty,” I found myself writing about “uncovering a golden snail/ with its Fibonacci spiral shell of armour.” For me, writing this sequence enabled me to connect through time and space with the spirit of Keats through his living words.
3. The book offers four sections all together: one on Hildegard and one on letters written by Keats, followed by two sections that are strictly focused on your own poetry. One of the latter is created in partnership with photographs by your husband, Mark Haddock, the other offers a series of poems related to the Corona virus. Each of these sections is exciting in its own way and strikes me as suitable to becoming a chapbook (or four chapbooks). In some ways they are separate, but in others they belong together. Can you describe the relationship between them? Clearly, they are all about ‘heart work’ or separate wonders of the world, and you have found a way to express your heart in response to them.
In terms of chronology, I wrote “Cariboo Fires, 2017,” a union of my husband’s photographs of the devastation wrought by the fires in BC, and my short haiku-like poems in 2018. “Negative Capability Suite” came along early in 2020, but I set it aside, wondering if it might become a chapbook or part of a longer volume. Then came “Songs for Hildegard” and “Corona Corona,” in 2020. The former was completed before Covid began, and the latter written during the early stages of the pandemic. Although these sequences are distinct in subject matter and form, when looking at them together, it occurred to me that the notion of “heart work” runs through them all. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s remark, “The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprison without you,” instantly became the epigraph for the book along with Margaret Avison’s words, “The optic heart must venture: a jail break/ And re-creation.” Through the contemplative writer Thomas Merton, I was aware of the eastern orthodox notion of “hesychasm” or “the prayer of the heart,” a tradition of contemplative prayer where the mind “lowers” into the heart to create a unified, non-dual state consciousness in which body, emotions, mind and spirit are experienced a unified whole. As I assembled the four sections, I noted that Hildegard, Keats, Julian of Norwich, a mystic from 14th century England included in the last section, “Corona Corona,” were all doing “heart work” in order to bring renewal, healing, and regeneration to their various times.
4. What central inquiry or question unified the collection?
The first two sections of Heart Work explore the lives and creative works of mystics and visionary artists from the past: Hildegard of Bingen from the 12th century and John Keats from the Romantic period in the 19th century. “Cariboo Fires” and “Corona Corona,” are set in the present, and attempt to explore what is happening both locally and globally at this time: raging fires caused by global warming and a new pandemic spreading throughout the world. For me, the unifying question became, “How to be here now?” What can we learn from these visionary artists that might inform and transform our destructive ways of being in the world? What is required of us in times of crisis? How might we individually and collectively become integrated within the deep ecology of the earth, letting go of and challenging exploitive systems based on egotism and greed? How might we become more grounded and interconnected with other species, systems, and forms of consciousness?
5. Can you reflect on any social contexts that might have been inspiring or generative for this work.
Another important theme in Heart Work is the need to unite contemplation and social action. All four sections of Heart Work speak to a longing to be reconnected to the earth, to the natural world and its cycles, particularly the non-human creatures and trees. Since childhood I have been a lover of trees, but in 2011 I became a full-on activist. My husband is an environmentalist who was instrumental in saving a region where he used to camp as a boy that is now Pinecone Burke Provincial Park. So, when a local forest near our home was under threat of being sold to developers by the Township, we joined a community campaign to save the forest. My contribution was what I called the Han Shan Poetry Initiative, whereby I collected poems from Canada and beyond and saw to it that they were tied gently to the trees where people could walk, read, and connect with the forest during the Christmas season. Han Shan was an 8th to 9th-century Pacific Rim Buddhist hermit monk who was said to have inscribed poems on rocks on Cold Mountain in China. After we garnered extensive press on the poems-in-the-forest events, a widow who read the stories in the newspapers stepped forward, purchased the land from the Township, and donated what is now The Blaauw Eco Forest to a local university that allows public access while protecting the area as an unique ecosystem. Students in the Environmental Studies program there are currently doing studies on at-risk species.
6. What would you say is the most fundamental difference between your earlier work and this new collection?
Spiritual and mythopoetic interests have been central to my writing all along, but over the past few decades I see my work as having become less anthropocentric and more earth-centered, grounded, and global. My early poetry was influenced mainly by British, European, and North American poets and writers. And my favourite Romantic poets remain, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, and Yeats. Yet as an undergraduate I began to explore the mystical sides of both Christianity & Judaism (the Kabbalah) and writers whose perspectives lie outside the parameters of rigid orthodoxy or mere conceptual understanding. In graduate school and beyond I developed an interest in eastern forms of spirituality including Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. My Ph.D. thesis was on the Welsh poet, Vernon Watkins, who drew me into the world of Celtic mythology. Currently I am attentive to Zen-like sayings in the gospels and have done much work on the diverse gnostic and non-canonical scriptures, both Christian and pre-Christian. I value Taoism, Tibetan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, and Celtic ways of being simultaneously in the earth and the larger cosmos. Although my literary interests have impacted my writing, decades of writing have enabled me to write from the particularities of my direct experience and to find my own voice.
7. How would you characterize the stance taken by this work in relation to the most immediate socio-cultural concerns of the readers it is intended for?
Although Heart Work examines figures from the past, it directly addresses the impacts of corporate capitalism and global warming on the ecospheres of the earth at this time. The poem “Hildegard’s Heart Tree,” for instance, draws on research by scientists like Suzanne Simard, who has recently brought attention to how trees help prevent global warming by using up carbon dioxide and generating oxygen, and how “mother trees” carry nutrients through fungal systems to younger trees. “Cariboo Fires” reveals the impacts of global warming and inadequate forestry practices on the increasing number of forest fires in BC and elsewhere. In “Corona Corona” the poem, “Small is Large” on the 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich, sets up a parallel between her times and ours. She lived during the Bubonic Plague in England yet found a way to serve her community by sharing her wisdom while self-anchored in her anchorage off the side of her church. The poem “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” moves from a line by Charles Dickens to indict the racist killing of George Floyd by a police officer that took place during Covid. My hope is that readers who aren’t conversant with Hildegard, Keats, or Julian might find themselves inspired to learn about them and discover some of the parallels and differences between their times and ours.
8. What books were you reading when you wrote this? Are there any books that you had to keep visiting for inspiration when writing this book?
I revisited Hildegard and Keats’s works, as well as Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love during the time when I was writing these poems. Though I am a poet first and foremost, I am also a Thomas Merton scholar, having had a long-time interest in Merton’s contemplative writings, political writings, journals, letters, and poetry. While writing Heart Work, I was re-reading Merton’s late-life correspondence with a then young eco-feminist, Rosemary Radford Ruether, who challenged him to take on more social and political activism the year before he left for his Asian tour in 1968 where he died. Ruether died recently in May of 2022, and has left a legacy of numerous ecofeminist studies, including Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions and Goddesses and the Divine Feminine. Mythic figures like the goddess Persephone in “Persephone’s Nook,” on whom I have written in my earlier volume of poetry, Demeter Goes Skydiving, figure in “Corona Corona” as well.
9. How did you arrive at the form/structure of the work? Did you have a form/structure in mind when you started? What other forms/structures or shapes did you consider? What was driving the choices of form/structure – efficiency or something else…Style, urge for innovation, compulsions of the genre, compulsions of a literary movement it aspires to connect with?
I didn’t have a particular form or structure for the book in mind initially, but when assembling the manuscript, I noted similarities and differences that gave each section a distinct tone and voice. The Hildegard poems are written entirely in unrhymed couplets with lines of varying lengths. Many lines contain caesuras and spaces between words that signal pauses and silences to evoke how her plainsong opens itself to creation and play. The poems on Keats continue with two-line stanzas at the beginning but expand to contain a variety of forms, including unrhymed free verse and stanzas composed of quatrains, tercets, and octaves. Some poems employ Keats’s use of rhymed iambic pentameter, while the second to last poem is a Shakespearean sonnet. I chose this form because Keats loved Shakespeare and wrote all his sonnets in the Shakespearean form of four quatrains and a rhyming couplet. My purpose was to combine traditional structures with open form in order to form a bridge between Keats’ time and ours. “Cariboo Fires” focuses on concision and Zen simplicity in order to interact effectively with Mark’s colour photos. The first poem of the last sequence, also titled “Corona Corona,” opens with questions in a conversational tone. However, its form is based on the traditional corona or “crown of sonnets” in which the last line of the first stanza becomes the first line of the next. Eventually the sequence comes full circle where the last line repeats the first line of the first sonnet. My corona is a contemporary adaptation, as my first and last lines echo but do not precisely duplicate each other, it is shorter than a traditional corona, and the lines of my fourteen-line stanzas are in free verse. In a nutshell, I was attempting to create rhythm and form by uniting tradition and innovation.
10. What was the most satisfying aspect about writing this book (other than perhaps the satisfaction of finishing it)?
What I found most satisfying about both the writing process and the completed book was sensing that its apparently disparate sections fit together beyond my expectations as I moved into the process of ordering the sequences. I loved collaborating with Mark when conjoining his photos with my poems. After the fires devastated areas near Young Lake in the Cariboo in 2017, we came to survey the damage together, noting that although our cabin was spared because of the firefighters’ intervention, many of the trees were burnt down, the boathouse, dock, and boat destroyed, and sites we loved to visit nearby completely devastated. Yet the landscapes also had a kind of eerie beauty where we could also see nature’s regenerative powers already at work. What remains satisfying about working on poems in response to Hildegard’s mandalas is that I am currently collaborating with fellow poet Harold Rhenisch on a series of poems titled Hilde & Johann in which Hildegard of Bingen and Johann Sebastian Bach join up in liminal space to survey our current era. The focus of this work in progress is on the musicality of poetry and the value of poetry in times of crisis. So sometimes the concerns of one book can reincarnate in new ways into another.
Susan McCaslin is a BC poet residing outside Fort Langley, BC who has published sixteen volumes of poetry including her most recent, Heart Work (Ekstasis Editions, 2020). She has edited two poetry anthologies, written a memoir, a volume of essays, and a volume of creative non-fiction. Susan did her Ph.D. in English Literature at UBC and taught English and Creative Writing at Douglas College in New Westminster, BC for 23 years. She initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project in 2012, which drew on poetry to help save an endangered forest in Glen Valley near her home on the ancestral lands of the Kwantlen First Nation.