Ann Fisher-Wirth
The Southeast Review: Do you see yourself as collaborating
with other artists or art forms when you write? I'm thinking
particularly of “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll,”
the Trinket poems, and poems like "The Day of the Dead"
and "'And from the East Like a Long Coffin Being Drawn,"
which both reference photographs.
Ann Fisher-Wirth: I’d say that I’m
responding to other artists and art forms, rather than that
I’m collaborating with them per se. The Trinket poems
came into existence because the experience of playing the
part of Trinket Dugan in Tennessee Williams’s little-known
one-act play “The Mutilated” was so intense, so
beautiful, that I had no choice but to dash home every night,
and write. Trinket is like Blanche Dubois ten years on down:
she is a millionaire’s middle-aged daughter, a belle
living in a seedy New Orleans hotel, a woman whose best friend
is a shoplifter and prostitute, a drunk who has had one cancerous
breast removed; and the play begins as she decides—catastrophically—to
pick up a twenty-year -old sailor for Christmas. As a happily
married mother of five, and a professor acting with students,
I found playing Trinket both exhilarating and threatening,
especially what it demanded in terms of both sexuality and
grief. That is the one time that poems have truly been channeled
through me; I could barely turn on the computer fast enough,
barely wait for the screen to light up, before another poem
would appear. They needed very little revision, appeared daily,
and reach completion as a cycle the day after the play’s
run ended.
At times I’ve also written ekphrastically. My favorite
of my ekphrastic poems is “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll.”
In June 2004 I saw a breathtaking exhibit of Chinese art,
called “Les Montagnes Celestes,” in Paris—and
among the works was a room-length, narrow horizontal scroll
by the Ming Dynasty artist Wu Wei. I spent hours walking the
scroll, back and forth, back and forth, drifting in and out
of all the tiny lives it portrayed, and the mountains beyond
mountains, the fog, the houses, the brushstroke-thin fishing
boats. One Buddhist metaphor for the universe is “mountains
and rivers without end,” and that is how I think of
the scroll and the poem. “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll,”
which is 16 pages long, has very few words; I like to think
that, like the scroll itself, one can enter the poem anywhere
and find it sufficient and complete at every moment, and that,
like the scroll itself, it foregrounds a plenteous silence.
[From "In the Body of the
World & the World of the Body: An Interview with Ann Fisher-Wirth"
in The
Southeast Review, Volume 24.1-2.
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