The Impulse to Write
by Barbara Strickland
Marlys
West writes some of the best poetry I’ve ever seen outside of a Norton’s Anthology. A
Marlys West poem has a brutal delicacy to it; she describes the wounded and
maimed with the same calm, almost impassive, devotion that she gives to her
poems about galaxies and saints. West’s written poems have been published in
Paragraph and the Laurel Review, among other national and local
literary publications. Her spoken word work with the Blue Plate Poets has been
heard on the stage of the Electric Lounge and the Lollapalooza tour.
Evangeline Was a Beauty Queen and Other Stories, her self-printed
collection of poems, won the 1994 Austin Book Award. She has a Master’s in
English from the University of Virginia and is presently finishing an MFA in
Poetry on a full support fellowship from the University of Texas. With all
that, and an interview in The Austin Chronicle, you might think
that Marlys West is something pretty special.
West doesn’t seem to think so. Her large gray eyes earnestly wide, she can and
will tick off endlessly the names of other Austin poets and writers whom she
seems to believe are her equals or better. It’s not entirely a self-effacing
“who, little old me?” impulse over avocado sandwiches and smoothies at Mother’s
Restaurant. West can speak pragmatically about the flaws of her poetry with one
breath, and with the next, state that someday she’d like to win the Nobel Prize
for literature. Ambition aside, however, Marlys West knows that she is one of
numerous fine, essentially unpublished, Austin writers — working stiffs who
attend school and work and pay their bills along with their dues, and, in the
narrow spaces between, find time to write.
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AC: You’re from Maryland originally. What brought you to Austin?
MW: I really like Austin. I was getting a Master’s in Anthropology at UT, but I
decided that I really wanted to do English. So I went to Virginia, got a
Master’s in English. Then I decided that I really didn’t want to teach. So I
moved back to Austin, just to live and work.
AC: And you’re presently getting an MFA at UT, in poetry.
MW: I applied to UT to the Texas Center for Writers about two years ago, and
was accepted. Oh my god, I’m getting another Master’s degree, what am I doing?
But [I am] finally going to school for what I really want to do. I feel like
now I’m finally getting an education, not to put down the other colleges I
attended.
AC: Let’s talk about your childhood, Ms. West. Would you say that as a child
you were particularly agonized? Poets do seem to be, you know.
MW: I guess I don’t think of myself as ever being “agonized.” I think more of
having a supervivid imagination. I did things like go down to the woods and
build houses out of mud for trolls and fairies, know what I mean? And my sister
and I both — and my brothers too — we just absolutely loved literature from a
very young age. That’s my mom, she was always very encouraging about reading.
AC: When did you start channeling that imagination into writing?
MW: (Very seriously) Actually, you know what it was? It wasn’t trolls, it was
elves. But. . . my mom used to give us journals and diaries. When I go back and
look at some of my journals, in some of them I wrote poetry. And it’s so bad
(laughs). You can’t hate what you did when you were eight. I think in one of
them I wrote this poem about pollution, how it was really bad and it made me
sad, doesn’t it make you mad.
But I never thought that I would write. And I certainly never thought that I
would write poetry, not even in high school or in college. So it’s kind of neat
to look back and think, oh look, even when I was a kid I was using this to
express important issues.
AC: What need is it that writing satisfies?
MW: I guess really the only impulse it answers is the impulse to write.
It doesn’t do anything else. Like, it doesn’t make me feel like, oh, I have a
reason to be on this planet, or God, I was born to be a writer. I just feel
like I’m doing something I really love…. If I’m sad, writing doesn’t fix it.
Or if I’m frustrated with something, or if I feel that there’s something I need
to work out or understand, writing doesn’t fix that for me.
I love reading, too. And I guess I want to be a little part of what I love. I
guess I want to push my foot in the door — “I’m great too” (laughs).
AC: Why poetry? Why not prose, or some other form?
MW: I was never very interested in telling stories, or creating a
narrative. For myself, I was more interested in calling into focus a particular
realization or moment or vision.
AC: I’ve always thought of poetry as distilling a moment from image.
MW: Yeah… When I’m writing poetry, I’m sort of stringing images
together.
AC: But nothing seems “strung together” in your poetry. There’s always a
feeling of order and precision.
MW: Thank you. But I think that order, this is really kind of hard to
get at, like maybe the way that I get at the order and the structure is more
subconscious in my poems. Because I really do feel like, I’m thinking,
“Geometry, mmmm, oh, yeah, I remember my geometry class, oh, what about that
guy with the fake hand, what about this, what about that.” And so I feel like,
oh this poem is just strung together, I am such a hack. But then I go back
through it and I know what doesn’t fit. I think subconsciously I know what I am
trying to say. Sometimes I’m really surprised.
AC: “Uncle Button” was about a mentally retarded man, “O Prosthetic”
features a man with a prosthetic arm, while in “Il Fortuna,” a woman blinds
herself. So I would be tempted to say that there seems to a theme of bodily
damage or even deficiency. What questions are you trying to pose with
that?
MW: I think I’m almost too young as a writer to be able to answer that. I’ll
probably feel like that for the rest of my life. [But] just when you said that,
I was thinking about a car accident that I saw, years and years ago. A woman
had died in a car wreck and was being pulled out. We were far enough away that
we couldn’t hear anything, but you just knew it wasn’t that they were being
rough but the way that they were pulling her out and the way the body moved,
you knew that she was dead.
And it was interesting, to realize how vulnerable this body was. I thought, oh
gosh, I don’t think of myself as this fragile thing but… I guess I’m just
amazed at how fragile things are. And I think I’m really interested in the
process of how people can fix that, like, somebody can lose a hand and have a
prosthetic, or lose an arm and have a prosthetic arm. And it doesn’t work as
well as a human arm works, but it works.
AC: “O Prosthetic” reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” She says,
“The art of losing is the hardest art to master.” The point being, I guess,
that eventually you lose everything whether you like it or not.
MW: I think everybody fights against that [idea.] Or I do. I think that sounds
hard, that the only thing you have is yourself. And then you think, “But look
how fragile we are.”
AC: Are there other poets to whom you look for guidance, whose works you
read for inspiration?
MW: I don’t think I look for guidance, necessarily, because I don’t
think anybody can help me figure out what I’m trying to say. But I do love
reading James Tate’s A Worshipful Company of Fletchers. And I love
reading Leon Lee. Tess Gallagher.
AC: What about Austin writers you’ve known? Who do you think deserves
special notice?
MW: Albert Huffstickler, of course. David Wevill, Robert Stanley,
Natasha Waxman — she’s wonderful — W. Joe Hoppe, Sharon Becker… there are
so many. Oh, certainly all the other Blue Plate poets. That was why we got
together, because we liked each other’s work so much.
AC: How long were you involved with the Blue Plate Poets?
MW: It would have been three years this fall. [I was] reading at Chicago
House, and I met the other members there. They were all reading as part of the
open mike, and Pasha, who had been part of Friendly Fire, which was another
Austin group, decided that he wanted to start another reading group. He and
Robert Stanley and Mike Henry asked myself and another woman if we wanted to be
part of the group. And eventually we got a regular gig at the Electric Lounge.
It was just really fun. I do miss it. I’m such a chicken that it was really
nice to have other people that I really liked and I liked their stuff and I
liked hanging out with them, it was really nice to have them on-stage too…..
[But] we had talked about different plans that we had. And then I wasn’t able
to be supercommitted because I’m going to school, and everybody had a bunch of
other stuff going on, so we just thought that maybe we would break up. But all
of us are still really friendly.
AC: It wasn’t like the Beatles, in other words.
MW: (Laughing) I’m sure we’ll do a reunion tour or something. I felt
really lucky to work with all of them. It was really nice…. All of us excited
about what we were doing and what we were reading, and having been able to
devote enough time in our lives to writing poetry. We always had a really good
audience at the Electric Lounge. People who really were, you know, maybe they
came to see the band, but were still really responsive and appreciative.
AC: Would you apply the words “writing scene” to Austin?
MW:When I think of Austin, I think, oh, God, this place is so supportive. There
must be a “scene” going on in that sense. There’s interest, there’s talented
people here, there’s places to do it, there’s support from the community.
AC: When I think of a scene, I think of the Beats.
MW: (Musing) I think that even if I were a contemporary of the Beats,
that I would only have heard of them, I might have had a beer with them or
something, but….
AC: I’d be too intimidated to speak to Kerouac. Maybe Ginsberg, but not
Kerouac.
MW: (Laughing) They wouldn’t have given a shit about what we thought
about poetry.
AC:Why do writers such as yourself and others seem to gravitate toward
Austin?
MW: I just think that’s there’s so much support. I mean we have these
local contests, there’s even a section in the paper for it, and when I look
back [through my] scrapbook, I don’t have anything in there that says, “and
then there was this really lame, sucky poet who garbled all her words and said
`shit.'” And I think that’s a lot of other people’s experience too, that for
whatever reason Austin doesn’t claw you down the way another place might. n
This article appears in September 27 • 1996 and September 27 • 1996 (Cover).