If you're looking for "I Spys," dating or LTRs, this is your scene.
View ProfilesPublished April 10, 2024 at 10:00 a.m.
Sydney Lea has been busy. The prolific writer, peripatetic teacher, influential editor and literacy activist has also long been a hunter, fisherman and ardent conservationist. Already the author of 15 poetry collections and eight books of essays, Lea, 81, recently published two new collections, one of poetry (What Shines) and another of meditative essays (Such Dancing as We Can). His second novel will be published this year.
Lea cofounded the New England Review in 1977 and edited it until 1989. He has taught at Yale University, Dartmouth College, Vermont College, Middlebury College and Wesleyan University.
In 2012, Lea was named a Field & Stream Conservation Hero for his leadership role with the Downeast Lakes Land Trust in Maine and other conservation efforts. As Vermont poet laureate from 2011 to 2015, he visited most of the state's town libraries. In 2021, he received the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts from the Vermont Arts Council.
Lea's writings explore the experience of humans in a jeopardized but still vital, ever-replenishing natural world. In the poems of What Shines and the essays of Such Dancing as We Can, he demonstrates a give-and-take, back-and-forth rapport between his poetry and prose, both thematically and formally. Some of the pieces in the two books resemble one another like siblings.
With three of his five children and all seven of his grandchildren also residing in Vermont, Lea lives with his wife, Robin Barone, in Newbury.
He responded to questions from Seven Days by email.
You've written many books of both prose and poetry. Are there differences in how a given piece begins and develops?
I don't mean to sound mystical, but my genres seem to choose me. I once shared a house with two friends, both architecture students who were protégés of the famous Louis Kahn; he had told them that the secret to good design was uncovering "what the building wanted to be." With regard to writing, that resonated 60 years ago and still does.
The new essay collection Such Dancing as We Can had its genesis in some "translations" of certain poems that I just hadn't gotten to where I wanted them. They seemed permanently stalled. Noodling around in the Augean stables of my computer files, something eventually told me these wanted the suppleness of prose.
I feel a greater call to make a poem a self-contained unit. Although I hope my poems remain open-ended, I do want the reader to feel that each has unfolded a recognizable drama, inner or outer.
A reader who knows their work will hear intonations of Robert Frost and William Wordsworth in your writing. Who else has continued to be a wellspring for you?
Well, there's the tendency in Robert Penn Warren to tell a story, which I share even when I don't want to. His Audubon: A Vision is, to me, a monument in American literary history — a masterful narrative. The ambiguous and intriguing relations of Emily Dickinson to the natural world have been important to me since I read "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" in high school.
But I suspect most of my profounder influences aren't literary in the strictest sense. The storytelling abilities of those old New Englanders I've known have been a beacon for me from the start. This is what launched me into imaginative writing. I heard and still hear those voices every day, and I wanted to get something of their cadences onto the page without imitating, because to use dialect might be confused as a sign of condescension.
What about music? You've written about well-loved forebears such as Bill Monroe, Merle Haggard, Etta James, Ray Charles...
Music has had an important impact on me, though I'm hard put to describe it. Especially jazz, and especially the hard bop era: Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach ... I almost always have some album playing as I compose. Having a given musical structure — within which to improvise, without losing sight of that structure — is something I often attempt in poetry.
In the recent poem "1949," you quote from a psalm: "We live our lives as a tale that is told." How do you see the connection between an author's lived experience and the crafting of a tale?
I find myself most confident, even ambitious, when the "facts" of a given poem are true, when the story is not invented. If I say, sadly, that I had a brother who died at 34, I better have had one. I feel especially beholden to a sort of nonfictional stance when I speak of misfortune or tragedy in the lives of other people.
Yet the act of shaping one's experience to articulate what feels most important is obviously a kind of editing. I sometimes alter chronological details, in the interest of whatever drama I'm striving to complete. As the great Dickinson urged us, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant."
There's a vigorous physicality to your remembrances, for instance in "No Way Out," "My Body Remembers a Day" and "Mere Humans." Have you ever kept journals, or do you work from memory and imagination?
In my first 10 or 15 years of writing, I kept a journal and then somehow just stopped. After publishing a few books, I may have felt I could start writing the poem directly. I have a journal entry from the early 1970s, for instance, in which I notice my uncanny physical recollection of my dad's death on its anniversary every year. By the time I wrote the poem "My Body Remembers a Day," I didn't need a jog to my recall; I just sat down and wrote a draft.
You conclude the essay "Army Specialized Depot #829, 1942," which is about your father, by wondering if you're "the last" who can "recall the very scent of this good man's sweat."
Well, my father was gone, to my devastation, 58 years ago, and my mother 24 years ago. As the first of five children, I've become the oldest member of our immediate clan, the one possessed of the most folk family history, so to speak. As I rocket into my ninth decade on our imperiled planet, and as the number of our grandchildren burgeons, I find myself irresistibly inclined to consider milestones in my and my relatives' lifespans.
From the outset, I've led a privileged life, unburdened by financial worries, surrounded by friends and kin I love deeply, but due to the ravages of addiction, there's been plenty to grieve for and regret: a good lot of unhappiness, of sad endings. But I've tried not only to reconcile myself to all that — I mean, I have no way of changing it, obviously — but also to look back and to salvage, well, "what shines."
How did your series of poems "Animate Objects" come about — an oblique chronicle of COVID-19, which you've called "a time of plague"?
One day I simply decided to look around the house in search of writing potential and found myself meditating on objects — an antique duck decoy, a model boat, a very old child's toy, a phoebe's nest we had picked up from the ground. That model boat had belonged to my beloved mother-in-law. I decided to animate these things by recalling, or in most cases guessing at, the stories attached to them. I was often surprised.
The words "wonder" and "marvel" recur like refrains in these new books.
Given some of my past abuses, I hope I never forget how fortunate I am to be here at all. I have been blessed by the long-term recovery that evaded many of my family members for generations. Though I'm a highly antinomian Christian, I choose to believe in grace, in what Jews calls chesed — that is, unmerited favor.
There's no rational way to explain that a beloved cousin of mine drank himself dead at 31, or that my good-hearted, generous, social-crusading younger brother died a cocaine addict at a just slightly older age. I can't rightly account, no, for why I dodged such misfortune. It's a wonder. It's a marvel. So even when least obviously, I'm writing about my undeserved miracle, because I'm a writer. Writing's what I do.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Disclosure: Jim Schley was an editor at the New England Review in the 1980s during Lea's tenure.
The original print version of this article was headlined "Shining On | Vermont poet Sydney Lea on his new collections of verse and prose"
Tags: Books, Sydney Lea, What Shines, Such Dancing As We Can
Comments are closed.
From 2014-2020, Seven Days allowed readers to comment on all stories posted on our website. While we've appreciated the suggestions and insights, right now Seven Days is prioritizing our core mission — producing high-quality, responsible local journalism — over moderating online debates between readers.
To criticize, correct or praise our reporting, please send us a letter to the editor or send us a tip. We’ll check it out and report the results.
Online comments may return when we have better tech tools for managing them. Thanks for reading.