Lisa Fay Coutley on The Social Distance Reading Series
Brought to you by The Vermont School and Green Mountains Review
In the wake of book event cancellations due to COVID-19, this pop-up series is designed to offer poets a platform for launching new collections of poems. Stay tuned for a new reading each Wednesday and Sunday.
Here’s Lisa Fay Coutley reading from tether, out from Black Lawrence Press.
Lisa Fay Coutley’s tether is characterized by a compressed tension, each line, each word, hitched to the next, quivering with the effort to remain connected and with the opposing desire to be released. The image of the tether accrues intensity in the course of the book: astronaut tethered to the ship, poet to the poem, mother to the homeless, addict child and child to the mother, and in the space between “the two / great opposing poles” is God, who learns, in that chasm, “wonder & suffering.” Indeed, oppositional forces reign in these poems; there are no conventional false resolutions to be had. “Every event / that’s saved my life has nearly killed me,” the speaker declares, and “I would rather live / with my burning than sleep with my dead.” This is a far-reaching book, a political book, a deeply personal and heroic book. Its thesis is reflected in its enviably honed diction. “Mystery is her / bitch,” the speaker writes of the eclipsing sun. The same is true of Lisa Fay Coutley and the ravishing poems of tether.
—Diane Seuss
In tether, a spacecraft of a book superbly conceived and assembled, Lisa Fay Coutley engineers both recovery and healing in poems that swerve emotionally between the landing bays of grief, longing, and wonder. A bright hunger constellates around these poems, but so too the immensities of love. Tether is a burning inquiry into the miracle of being here on earth and what keeps us fastened to each other, for better or worse.
–Major Jackson
GMR: How do you begin a new piece of writing? What conditions help your writing process?
LFC: I usually begin with an image or phrase that’s gripping me, and I write most easily in the quiet of my office (where this reading took place).
GMR: What was an early experience that taught you language has power?
LFC: I grew up in a house of music, rather than books, and from a very early age my dad insisted I listen to lyrics and think about what they meant, and seeing the way music moved him (a proud and angry man) easily to tears had a big impact on me growing up. Music was really my first entrance to poetry.
GMR: What poets or writers do you continually go back to?
LFC: Ovid, Rilke, Larry Levis, Sylvia Plath, Jack Gilbert, Yusef Komunyakaa
GMR: What is your favorite childhood or adolescent book?
LFC: I don’t recall my own, but as a mother of two sons we spent a lot of time with Shel Silverstein as an early entrance into poetry.
GMR: What are your thoughts on social distancing?
LFC: I think it’s one thing to choose to be reclusive, such as I am often, but it’s another to tell my rebel heart it must stay home. The loneliness is palpable for that reason, but I am heartened to see so many folks coming together in this way to stay connected and support each other. I’m heartbroken to think of what people are going through and hope we can come through with even more compassion for one another and the separate yet tethered lives we live.
GMR: Where can we find you?
The Social Distance Reading Series
Brought to you by The Vermont School and Green Mountains Review
We’re thrilled to host The Social Distance Reading Series, a collaboration between Green Mountains Review and The Vermont School poets. In the wake of book event cancellations due to COVID-19, this pop-up series is designed to offer poets a platform for launching new collections of poems. At this point, we are focusing on collections by poets whose book events have been cancelled between January through May 2020.
Stay tuned for a new reading each Wednesday and Sunday.
Thanks,
–Didi Jackson, Major Jackson, Kerrin McCadden, and Elizabeth Powell, series curators.
–Kylie Gellatly, editorial assistant, interviewer.