A long-time admirer of “Okie” poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, ever since I read her amazing Wormwood Review chapbook, A Girl from Buttonwillow, in 1990, I recently got the notion to interview her, which would’ve been my first interview, ever.
Knowing of her reluctance toward being interviewed, if not mistrust of such as being a worthwhile pursuit, I composed fourteen questions and mailed them off to her, my fingers crossed, because somehow I knew she’d not go for it. She didn’t.
Albeit accompanied with a kind note that read, “Joan, I hope this hodgepodge will be of some help in a review. My eyes are not behaving their best,” as I’d feared, although I’d tried to be as objective, as probingly intellectual as possible, she felt many of my questions intrusive, a reaction which could easily be expected from a woman-of-few-words-but-all-good-ones that Wilma is--a poet whose writing exhibits the least amount of “I” or egoism a reader will ever see in literature, especially poetry. My attempt, however misguided, was genuinely meant as a tribute, and had she endeavored to respond, her answers to my questions that I now realize were contrived and superficial, could never have been as real, spontaneous and true as the following remarkably compelling and enlightening stream of consciousness she so graciously wrote me in her own, inimitable handwriting, upon five pages of blue-lined spiral notebook paper that easily may be suitable for framing on the venerable walls of the Library of Congress.
April 30, 1999
Dear Joan,
I am not ungrateful when genuine critics ask to interview me. There are so few such critics, and even fewer of them who would even touch my poetry. This fact comes to me most clearly from college students whose theses on my writing are rejected by their professors for not being “scholarly.” It wasn’t poor work on the student’s part, but on their Okie subject. As late as two months ago, an earnest young graduate student told me this solemnly face-to-face. Some so-called academics can be so limited in what they perceive poetry to be.
Though not ungrateful, I am not overjoyed at being interviewed. I always feel so ridiculous, so vulnerable. I ask myself on these infrequent occasions, Who cares about my poetry? And whose business is it to know anything about my private life? This is where I can get bogged down. This is why I am so limited in giving interviews. I feel it will be different with you. I can’t limit you to ten or twenty lines in my Chiron Review bio, or even less as in the new Heyday Books anthology, Geography of Home. I can perhaps help you with a few really pertinent facts.
Right off, I was always (or have always been) some kind of poet. It came with me, like the color of my eyes. The first poem I memorized was The Sandpiper by Celia Thaxter. It was probably taught in the Texas schools in your parents’ school days. I recited it to myself over and over: Across the narrow beach we flit, One little sandpiper and I, And fast I gather, bit by bit, The scattered driftwood bleached and dry. You probably know the other stanzas yourself. The poem has stayed with me as a precious companion all these many years.
My country school teachers were very heavy on the New England poets: Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier. These served me well, until about at age nineteen or twenty, I discovered Walt Whitman. The old established poets were a lost cause. I obtained a copy of Leaves of Grass and devoured it after work. I also had to be wary of family eyes, and hid the thin green book far back under the couch between clandestine readings. I rarely met anyone with whom I could express my awe at discovering this incredible book. Indeed, I was afraid to do so. I began to allow myself strange thoughts. Maybe it would be permissible for me to string my poems out line by line any way they came to me.
When I read poems by Emily Dickinson, I found them a poor second to those of Amy Lowell. In each experience, I always felt a secret twinge of shame for rejecting staid and more conservative writers.
About 1940 while I was working as a maid, my employer told me that he felt that I had the potential to become a poet and scholar. He selected various books from his library and introduced me to the great Indian poet Tagore, and to the Hindu Vedas. He read to me from an exquisitely illustrated copy of The Rubáiyát and the Koran.
I have never discussed this astonishing early experience because no BA from podunk Normal would believe it. They are more at ease thinking I am almost totally illiterate, that I never heard any classic books read by a consummate scholar, then made them my own in libraries where they were available.
I must give credit to sharecropper families who ordered entire sets of books by Zane Grey, James Oliver Curwood and especially, my personal favorite, Jack London. These were loaned around to certain trustworthy readers, my older brother being one of such.
In later years the writing of Wallace Stegner affected me deeply. The Big Rock Candy Mountain in particular. I live near the scene of the Mussel Slough tragedy and I have always been moved by the novel by Frank Norris.
I read a fair amount of poetry (what moves me). The work of Sherman Alexie causes the top of my head to rise and fall. The poetry of Charles Plymell has a somewhat similar effect on me. We know perfectly well when poetry wounds us.
You ask what writers may have influenced my own writing. As before mentioned, Walt Whitman gave me the secret courage to write what I pleased. Many years later I felt an affirmation of my poetry in that of William Carlos Williams, a further freeing for me.
My entire childhood and early adulthood were formed, forged, in great rural poverty and hardship. My mother was a devoutly religious woman of heroic stature. I close my eyes and see her with head tied up in a baby diaper taking down frozen laundry from the clothesline. This sometimes had to be accomplished by hauling water two miles from a neighbor’s well. The smell of lye soap assails my nostrils in memory. I see Mama’s hands so reddened and raw from the homemade soap. I learned firsthand how caustic it was, I took my turn at the washboard early.
I suppose as far as suffering, ill health, non-existent medical attention for years at a time, and lowered expectations go, I could probably swap horror stories with some of the best whiners, but that would be ridiculous and a waste of energy. I am simply not a whiner. I do not enjoy it, or the ones who indulge in it surrounded by taxpayer luxuries I never dreamed of. There, we will never mention whining again.
Isn’t it difficult for us poets to assess ourselves in relation to our writing? I meet some poets who are nothing like their work. It causes me to judge that I am rather similar to my work. We are so interwoven. My late spiritual director once told me that a poet’s artistic and spiritual life cannot be separated. That helped me so much.
At this point in my long life I am surprised to be writing quite new and different poetry and getting much of it published by the small, small presses, all praise and gratitude to them.
I still mourn the passing of Marvin Malone who never needed anyone to tell him it was OK to publish anything I sent him.
I need to publicly thank some of the great people who have encouraged me steadily since I ventured (crept) out of obscurity with my poems on scrap paper. Robert Peters has been a giant archangel type with flaming sword who cleared my path many times. Bob Hershon of Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn has been as good to me as Bob ever gets, and that is saying quite a bit.
About favorite prayers. The Peace Prayer of St. Francis has to be one of my favorites, along with millions of other people of all religious persuasions.
I would hope all of us could take it as our own motto into the new millennium.
God bless poets!
Amen.
--Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel
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