By Megan Feifer
With this interview we continue with our series of web interviews with The Southern Review contributors.
Lindsay Stuart Hill’s poem “The Finches” appears in the winter 2016 issue. Interview conducted and condensed by The Southern Review/LSU Press marketing intern Megan Feifer.
1). Since the publication of your first chapbook “One Life,” what have you been up to? What are you currently working on?
Last year, I graduated from the University of Virginia’s MFA program in poetry and began teaching as an assistant professor of creative writing at Sweet Briar College. During my time at UVA, I became fascinated with koans, which are texts depicting short anecdotes from the lives of Zen masters. Koans often contain a puzzling question practitioners might focus on in meditation, such as: What is your original face, the face you had before your parents were born? A koan can’t be answered quickly or logically. Instead, you must live with it, carrying it with you all hours of the day and night, letting it confound you again and again.
I spent about five months in India back in 2008, and for the past few years I’ve been working on a book that addresses that experience, often through the lens of the koan. The speaker of the poems travels through a variety of landscapes, from a Parisian cathedral to a small poultry farm. But India acts as a central, recurring landscape—one that is both physical and metaphysical. There, in an utterly foreign social, economic, and racial context, the speaker must encounter the koan we all struggle to address: What does it mean to live inside a body, and a self?
2). Where did the poem “The Finches” begin for you?
It began at a winery north of Charlottesville where I took a summer job while I was finishing graduate school. More specifically, it began in a house where I was dog sitting, on an evening several weeks after two customers at the winery had asked me a very strange question. The question was like a koan, and I ended up putting it directly into the poem. But I didn’t start with the question, or the dog it referred to. I started with the dog who was right beside me—with the sound of her drinking sloppily from her water dish, with the clinking metal tags on her collar. That’s often how poems begin for me, with just sitting and looking and listening, and writing down what I observe. Charles Wright has this series of lovely, sprawling poems, and they’re called “Looking Around” because that’s where each of them begins—he just starts pulling everything around him into the poem. I like to start with looking around. It keeps me grounded, and puts me in a more receptive state of mind.
3). The poem appears to weave together silences with intimate revelations. For example, the poem opens with an everyday silence between coworkers: “. . . we’ve run out/ of things to talk about,” which quickly transforms into a moment of observation and revelation for character and speaker alike. What role does silence play in the poem?
I didn’t contemplate the role of silence much when I was writing “The Finches,” but it’s definitely present in all three sections. For me, introducing silence means introducing space, and especially in a poem that deals with death and suffering, I feel you need to make a lot of space—a lot of room for pausing and breathing, and for the entrance of empathy. Some poems do this with direct or indirect references to emptiness or silence, others do it through making a lot of literal space on the page. But I think every poem I find moving has a kind of silence at the heart of it. Maybe it also goes back to what I was saying about looking around—it’s when you shut up and look out the window at something, when you really let it enter you, that those “intimate revelations” can happen.
4). Can you explain your idea behind the speaker’s response to the conundrum posed by the two female customers? In particular, the line: “I want to say that all lonelinesses are equal, that loss is loss/ is loss. A meaningless and paralyzing equation, and I know/ it’s not the truth.”
In the earliest draft of the poem, I kept reaching for a definitive answer to the question those two women posed. I talked about consciousness and unconsciousness, helplessness and free will, responsibility and innocence. But you can’t answer a koan rationally. The understanding has to come from a deeper place. Of course, the fumbling for answers is a stage you have to go through. But my many fraught attempts eventually gave way to a different kind of response, one that arrived suddenly and spontaneously.
I was also taking a course on Japanese Buddhism at the time, and I think that those lines speak to some questions raised by Buddhist teachings. Is it possible to contain all beings within the reach of our compassion? And if not, can we assume the right to establish a hierarchy of compassion, which would also imply a hierarchy of suffering?