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| Elaine Feinstein |
The interview appeared in PN Review almost exactly 100 issues ago, back in PN Review 101, from theWinter of 1995. The full text is available online.
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Your poetry's very beautiful, I think, because it takes what's been lost, what's been broken and what's been damaged and through the act of making the poem finds it again. In terms of what you are talking about now, perhaps that is something about continuity.
It is more like an amoeba reforming when you've prodded it. I think there's something that demands a particular kind of resilience. As a poet, you mustn't have a very hard outside wall to protect you, and so you receive a great deal of damage. Yet you have to move on and continue. Perhaps that is similar to the way in which the Jewish sensibility has survived.
In your poems, I see someone who is extremely vulnerable, who lets in the world --
Yes.
Yes.
-- for good or for evil, but you can't choose, I think, can you? And then [that someone] makes something and allows it to go - the poem's completed and then on you go and you move sometimes from myth to myth. That is a very interesting development, I think, in the middle of these Selected Poems. The very personal voice of the beginning becomes infused by larger collective voices from other places. We have talked a bit about the Judaism input but you get into Greek myth, don't you?
Yes, I think in order to write longer poems, I wanted to use story in a rather unusual way. In both the Dido and Aeneas, and the Eurydice sequence I've really written a succession of lyrics and because the story's such a familiar one I don't actually have to write narrative poetry. There is a longer span of a poem possible and the lyrics lie across the line of the story like washing over line.
Well, I certainly began writing earlier than the feminist movement, if we take feminism as a Seventies phenomenon, I began writing in the early Sixties. It is interesting, though, what you identify as confidence. I would say that poetry, or the act of shaping my feelings into poems, gave me a kind of coherencewhich I much needed. In those early days I was very conscious of the strangeness of being a woman poet. There were so few of us, and they -- women poets -- were felt to be quite unnatural creatures, almost witchy and certainly eccentric, and I was very conscious of that. Maybe that's why I invoke strangeness as a kind of power in an early poem being taken for a witch.
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| Elaine Feinstein. Photo by V. Carew Hunt |
Yes. I am less happy with my sybiline personality though. And I would now prefer to see whatever is supernatural as something inner rather than having anything to do with magic. Actually, of course, that is what The Celebrantsis about: the temptation of the occult and the resistance of human sanity.
What you did in the poems is open up this large internal space for the self. I kept being struck by that -- how the poems widen out the road -- they widen out the field and this voice can dance in it and be as large and as loud and as small and as playful as it wants which I think is quite marvellous, absolutely marvellous.
I live now in fairly cramped space and I am not very domestically proficient so I work in a small niche surrounded by mess most of the time, and it doesn't disturb me as perhaps it ought to because what seems to be real is what is going on in my head. So I am very conscious and grateful for that inner space. Everyone has it, of course.
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The Selected Poems under discussion above, as well as Feinstein's most recent collection, Cities, are published by Carcanet Press. Carcanet has also recently published Bride of Ice, a selection of Feinstein's translations of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva; you can listen to her reading Tsvetaeva's poignant 'An Attempt at Jealousy' here.
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