Writing career like an amateur circus performer

Lisa Olstein

Lisa Olstein is the author of Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), which won the Hayden Carruth Award, and of Lost Alphabet (2009). A recipient of a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from both the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Centrum Foundation, Olstein has been widely published. She presently serves as associate director of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts and is a cofounder of the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts & Action.

A nano-interview

MCC: What’s new and exciting at Juniper Initiative these days?
Lisa: We’re gearing up for this year’s annual literary festival (April 24 & 25) which will celebrate the Massachusetts Review’s 50th anniversary with two days of readings, performances, and a journal and book fair. Readers will include Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Hacker, Christian Hawkey, Lucy Corin, Thomas Glave, and others. And, we’re happily processing applications for this June’s Juniper Summer Writing Institute, a weeklong program (one for adults, one for high school aged writers) of poetry, fiction, and memoir workshops, along with readings and craft sessions. Faculty and writers in residence include Mark Doty, James Tate, Lydia Davis, Dara Wier, Charles D’Ambrosio, Paul Lisicky, and other amazing writers.
MCC: How do you balance your duties at Juniper and the MFA Program with your writing career?
Lisa: Ideally: carefully, and with joy. Realistically: like an amateur circus performer juggling flaming hoops in a tiny car. . .
MCC: What are you working on these days, writing-wise?
Lisa: Poems that, hopefully, will make up my third collection. My second book of poems, Lost Alphabet, will be out this June.
MCC: What writer do you most admire but write nothing like?
Lisa: Li Po (she says with conviction).
MCC: Computer, longhand, or typewriter?
Lisa: Longhand on random slips and scraps to jot down passing phrases, then computer for the real deal, such as it is.
MCC: Do you secretly dream of being a) a pop icon, b) an algebra teacher, and/or c) a crime-solver/writer a la Jessica Fletcher?
Lisa: d) dolphin trainer, of happy, cage-free, entirely fulfilled human- and trick-loving dolphins.
MCC: How many revisions does your work typically go through?
Lisa: Anywhere from none (a rare and delightful occurrence) to dozens.
MCC: Do you ever revise your work on the spot during live readings?
Lisa: I really try not to, but occasionally a word here or there.
MCC: Please revise the following sentence:Though every muscle in his body urged him not to, Sanderson crept toward the tinted windows of the gray-green Caprice.
Lisa:Sanderson crept.
Every muscle, urge him
toward caprice. Urge him
forward toward window
stinted grey-green in the body.
Urge him not to.

Some of her poems
Deserter’s Information Center

The flags on Main Street say
you are one, are you one of us?
They hang in the exhalation
of three thousand people sleeping,
breathing deeply, eyes whirring,
coding messages, shedding messages,
the night before a parade.
Coyotes are lying down in their dens.
The nest of phoebes has not yet woken;
the half of each bird’s brain that sleeps,
remains sleeping. Corn repeats itself
into a haze of tassels and sheaving leaves.
Autumn sharpens its knives.
No more movies hung on sheets
in the park, in the school parking lot,
until next year. Next year.
Your children will become unrecognizable.
They will love a picture of you
more than you every time you speak.
The smell in the hall will migrate
back and forth between memories,
behind doors: substitute ghost
once again waiting, once again come

Negotiation

You take the mortar; I’ll take the pestle,
the weight we laid five years before the door.

You take the door, its flank and hollow.
You take the hollow morning we set out,

I’ll take the conch shell, the sea.
You take the sea, our kitchen window looking out on it.

I’ll take the kitchen; you take the potatoes,
their rough edges, their eyes.

You take the flashlight’s eye we turned skyward
to rebut the stars. I’ll take the sky it travels.

You take my fear of long journeys, of talking in my sleep.
I’ll take sleep and the first morning sounds

of the monastery on the hill. You take the monks;
I’ll take the way they sweep the ground

before every step, the way they nurse other men’s
crippled oxen through long flickering nights.

That Magnificent Part the Chorus Does about Tragedy

There is a theory of crying that tears are the body’s way ofreleasing excess elements from the brain. There is a theory ofdreaming that each one serves to mend something torn, likecells of new skin lining up to cover a hole. I’m not one to havedreams about flying, but last week we were thirty feet above thebay—this was where we went to discuss things, so that no matterwhat we decided it was only we two out there, and we’d haveto fly back together. I’m not one to have dreams where animalscan speak, but last night a weeping mare I’d been told to bridlewanted me to save her.

Dear One Absent This Long While

It has been so wet stones glaze in moss;
everything blooms coldly.

I expect you. I thought one night it was you
at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs,

you in a shiver of light, but each time
leaves in wind revealed themselves,

the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak.
We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove.

In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires
over which young men and women leapt.

June efforts quietly.
I’ve planted vegetables along each garden wall

so even if spring continues to disappoint
we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain.

I have new gloves and a new hoe.
I practice eulogies. He was a hawk

with white feathered legs. She had the quiet ribs
of a salamander crossing the old pony post road.

Yours is the name the leaves chatter
at the edge of the unrabbited woods

Radio Crackling, Radio Gone

Thousands of planes were flying and then
they stopped. We spend days moving our eyes

across makeshift desks, we sit on a makeshift floor;
we prepare for almost nothing that might happen.

Early on, distant relations kept calling.
Now, nothing: sound of water

tippling a seawall. Nothing: sparks
lighting the brush, sparks polishing the hail,

the flotsam of cars left standing perfectly still.
Thud of night bird against night air,

there you are on the porch, swath
of feathers visible through the glass,

there you are on the stairs where the cat fell
like a stone because her heart stopped.

What have you found in the wind above town square?
Is it true that even the statues have gone?

Is there really a hush over everything as there used to be
in morning when one by one we took off our veils?

Another Story with a Burning Barn in It

I was on the porch pinching back the lobelia
like trimming a great blue head of hair.

We’d just planted the near field, the far one
the day before. I’d never seen it so clear,

so gusty, so overcast, so clear, so calm.
They say pearls must be worn or they lose their luster,

and that morning I happened to remember,
so I put them on for milking, finding some

sympathy, I guess, between the two.
Usually I don’t sit down until much later in the day.

The lobelia was curling in the sun. One by one
birds flew off, and that should have been a sign.

Trust is made and broken. I hardly sit down
at all. It was the time of year for luna moths,

but we hadn’t had any yet settling on the porch
or hovering above the garden I’d let the wild rose take.

Dear One Absent This Long While

It has been so wet stones glaze in moss;
everything blooms coldly.

I expect you. I thought one night it was you
at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs,

you in a shiver of light, but each time
leaves in wind revealed themselves,

the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak.
We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove.

In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires
over which young men and women leapt.

June efforts quietly.
I’ve planted vegetables along each garden wall

so even if spring continues to disappoint
we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain.

I have new gloves and a new hoe.
I practice eulogies. He was a hawk

with white feathered legs. She had the quiet ribs
of a salamander crossing the old pony post road.

Yours is the name the leaves chatter
at the edge of the unrabbited woods.