Ellen Bass: California Poets Part 4, Three Poems

Ellen Bass

December 29th, 2021

California Poets: Part IV

Ellen Bass

Three Poems

Photograph: Jews Probably Arriving to the Lodz Ghetto circa 1941–1942 Why is a horse here alongside the train? Two horses yoked with leather harnesses, light silvering their flanks in the midst of the Jews descending? Where is the driver taking the cart, loaded with wooden planks? What is in the satchel that weighs down the arm of a woman in a dark coat, her hair parted on one side? A woman I could mistake for my mother in the family album. Only my mother was in Philadelphia, selling milk and eggs and penny candy because her mother escaped the pogroms, a small girl in steerage crying for her mother. What are the tight knots of people saying to one another? A star burns the right shoulder blade of each man, each woman. Light strikes each shorn neck and caps each skull. No one is yet stripped of all but a pail or a tin to drink from and piss in. Dread, like sun, sears the air and breaks over the planes of their faces. Light clatters down upon them like stones, but we can’t hear it. Nor can we hear blood thud under their ribs. They will be led into the ghetto and then will be led out to the camps, but for now, the eternal now, the light is silent, silent the shadows in the folds of their coats. The bones of the horses are almost visible. Their nostrils are deep, soft shadows. And the woman, who could be but is not my mother, still carries her canvas bag and, looking closer, what might be a small purse. from Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Pushing This morning before we’re even out of bed, she’s wading thigh deep in some kind of existential dread. She’s been living in a grotto of fear. Not suicidal— her grandparents didn’t flee the pogroms just so she could down a handful of confetti-colored pills. But she’s asking why she is living when every step she takes is a slog through this murky water. Terrible as it is to admit, the first response I think of is for a great cappuccino. I’m remembering waking up in southern Italy outside Alberobello. It was December and every day we’d bundle up and walk into town to drink that creamy brew with fresh-baked bread and slabs of butter. But of course I don’t say that. I don’t say anything. I’ve already said every hopeful thing I can think of. But she says, I have to look at my fear with curiosity. Like when we were watching the larvae hatch. A few weeks ago she found a cluster of eggs on a blackberry leaf. When we got it under the hand lens, they were glued together in a perfect symmetry. And at that exact moment the first larvae were cracking through their casings, white, soft-bodied babies pushing and pushing, working to get through the tiny opening. They’d swallowed the amniotic water and were swollen with it. As I stared, scale shifted and the head of the one that was first to be born began to seem huge as it labored toward release. Like a human head trying to squeeze through the cervix. We watched the slippery larva reach the threshold and slide into the open, bearing the command of its body to be born and then to start eating the green flesh of the earth. I remember how light she was, how almost happy, and how, for a moment, I wasn’t afraid. from Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Not Dead Yet for Dan The apricot tree with its amputated limbs like a broken statue. Condors. Bluefins. Lioness at Amboseli, her bloodstained mouth. She rises and walks beyond the shade of the thornbush, crouches and pees. My mother-in-law. Should I kill myself? she asks me— her mind an abandoned building, a few squatters lighting fires in the empty rooms. Fire. Wildfires. The small animals running. Paramecia swimming in a petri dish. My son’s rabbits nibbling grass. Soon he’ll cradle each one and speak to it in a silent language before breaking its neck. But today, in the feverish heat, he wraps his old T-shirt around a block of ice for them to lean against. Hair. Nails. Heart carried in ice. Sperm carried in a vial between a woman’s breasts. Bach. Coltrane. The ocean even with its radiation and plastic islands. Farmed salmon, even with their rotting flesh. Two young women on the beach at Cala San Vicente. One kisses the shoulder of the other before she smooths on sunscreen. Wind. The bougainvillea’s shadow shivering on the cold wall. Stone. The quiver inside each atom. Sappho: mere air, these words, but delicious to hear. from Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Interview

March 8th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Ellen Bass, Poet, Writer

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: I’d like to go way back and talk about Anne Sexton. At Boston University you had a chance to study with her. What was that experience like and to what extent do you still feel her influence so many years later?

EB: Anne Sexton saved me. I’d gotten unhelpful feedback from my male poetry teachers at B.U. My poems weren’t good, but the feedback was only to take lines out, without any advice about how to make them better. So whatever little life was in those poems was just squeezed out. This was back in 1969-1970 and I was writing about the concerns of a young woman in a time when the second wave of women’s liberation was just getting going and these men didn’t know what to do with a young woman’s voice. The second semester of the program I was in a workshop with Anne and although I don’t think she thought all that much of my poems either, she encouraged me to write more, to take up space on the page, to spread out. That little bit of validation and guidance was enough to water my little plant and keep me going.

Anne was flamboyant and dramatic in her readings, but in the classroom she was all about the students. She was thoughtful and respectful. She loved teaching. And of course she was a great poet and I continue to teach her poems and learn from them.

DG: A huge honor arrived in 2013, when Philip Levine chose to read your poem “What Did I Love” in The New Yorker. The podcast featured poems that had previously been included in the magazine—and not only was yours selected, it was also chosen by a poet you greatly admire. Could you talk a bit about the inspiration behind that piece and how much editing went into the work before it was accepted?

EB: It was, indeed, a huge honor. So huge that I couldn’t believe it at first. This was the first New Yorker Poetry Podcast and I didn’t know that my poem was going to be part of it. I didn’t even know there was a New Yorker Poetry Podcast. One morning I got an email from one of my students who said “listen to this,” and included the link. I started listening and I thought it was a spoof, that she somehow had the technology to make it sound like Phillip Levine was talking about my poem! As I continued to listen I realized it was real and I called my wife in to listen. Afterward I told her that I hoped other good things would happen with my poetry, but if this was it, I could die happy.

This poem came about because my wife and I were increasingly concerned about the way the meat we ate was raised. We were trying to find chicken that was sustainably raised, but the more research we did, the less satisfied we were. Then a young couple we knew told us they were raising chickens for themselves on their land and if we wanted, they could raise some for us too. We quickly agreed. I had no idea how long it took to raise chickens, but three months later we got a call asking if we wanted to help slaughter the chickens. I believed that if I was going to eat an animal, I should be willing to kill it myself, so I said yes.

Writing the poem was a genuine investigation. Every poem should be that, but, for me, some are more deeply an investigation than others. I was trying, of course, to make the strongest poem I could, but even more, I was trying to understand something about my experience. Writing the poem, though its subject is death, was a joy. I wasn’t thinking about what anyone else would think about the poem, just my own process of discovery. It was also a challenging poem to write because I didn’t want it to sound like an instruction book for how to kill a chicken. To mitigate that, I knew I’d have to work with the music of the poem. I’d tried to write a poem some years earlier in a form that Dorianne Laux created where each line ends on the same consonant sound. That earlier poem of mine was a failure, but I thought I could do something like that in this poem, only I gave myself more latitude and made the rule be that the last word in every line had to have an “r” in it. I also put in as many words with “r” in them as were willing to enter. So I created a lot of sonic glue. (At the very end, I changed one or two line breaks because they were too wonky, but in the penultimate draft of the poem, all the lines did end with an “r” word).

I can’t remember how long it took me to write, but I did have pages and pages of lists of “r” words and I remember the process being everything that writing a poem should be, most of deeply engaging.

DG: Did you ever have the opportunity to speak with Philip Levine about the specific reasons why he loved the poem and how he came to accept it?

EB: I didn’t have the opportunity to speak with Phillip Levine, but he does, in the podcast, talk about what he admired, as does Paul Muldoon. Their praise put me over the moon.

DG: In 1974 you moved to Santa Cruz, where you live to this day, and began teaching creative writing. What prompted the move and how much did your writing change as a result of the new environment?

EB: I first visited Santa Cruz when my then-partner was working here one summer and I fell in love with it. Actually, I fell in love with Boulder Creek, which is up in the redwoods a forty-five minute drive north from Santa Cruz. There was a restaurant there, called The Shire, that we stopped at and ate amazing lasagna for almost no money at all and that cinched it. We moved to an acre in the redwoods, bordered on two sides by the San Lorenzo River, at the end of a dirt road. It was a summer house with the only heat being a fireplace, but I loved it there, learned to use a chain saw (and even learned to sharpen one), took long walks with our puppy, and started teaching writing workshops which I called “Writing About Our Lives.” Because I was out here at the edge of the continent and not connected to a college or university or publishers and such, I had freedom to just write as I pleased. This was a blessing and a curse. The curse was that I didn’t learn how to develop my skills as a poet, but the blessing was that I got to sit in circles in my living room with women who were breaking silences about many things that had never (or only very rarely) appeared in literature. It was an exhilarating time.

DG: What are your favorite literary and non-literary places in Santa Cruz and how has the city changed?

EB: I walk on West Cliff Drive almost every day and never get tired of the ocean! Santa Cruz is much more crowded, has way too much traffic, and the price of housing is insanely high so it’s not the little town of artists, surfers, and hippies that it used to be. But I’ve lived here too long to want to go anywhere else and it’s still paradise. I live a twenty minute walk from the ocean, a twenty minute drive from the redwoods, surrounded by state parks. We have a great bookstore, Bookshop Santa Cruz, that hosts readings by poets and writers and two poetry reading series in town so many of the greatest poets of our time come here to read.

DG: Teaching has been a very important part of your career. You’ve worked with so many students, and a large number of them were unfortunately sexually abused as children. These stories affected you to such an extent that you went on to write books on the topic and even co-edited the anthology I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, which sold more than 60,000 copies. These were years marked by a time mostly away from your own poetry, and yet, at the same time, this was a very significant, creative period. Would you call it one of the most meaningful chapters of your career—both in relation to you personally and the impact you made on other people’s lives?

EB: Yes, absolutely. (I also co-authored, with Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, that was translated into twelve languages and sold well over a million copies). I began addressing this issue because women in my “Writing About Our Lives” workshops started writing about being sexually abused as children. I was not abused myself and had never heard of this, but I felt that it was essential that I help them tell their stories and then, help them heal. It was, as you say, extremely meaningful to me. I’ve rarely felt so useful. The work was absolutely compelling. It was a calling. I was deeply involved in it for many years.

DG: Was it difficult transitioning back to writing more poetry?

EB: Yes! Very difficult. It took me some years to really get back to writing poetry again. And I don’t know how I would have done it without the support of my brilliant mentor, Dorianne Laux.

DG: You have also taught poetry to incarcerated men and women in California’s prison system. Could you talk about how that started and to what extent instructional approaches differ from the other types of teaching you do?

EB: I’d always thought about teaching in prison, but never took steps toward that. And then one day I got a call from the prison psychologist at Salinas Valley State Prison (formerly known as Soledad) who wanted to start a poetry workshop and asked if I would teach it. I immediately agreed and after about nine months of red tape, we began. The main difference I encountered was that the men were more eager to jump into discussion than anywhere else I’d ever taught. Usually when I taught, I’d present a poem I admired and point out some aspects of the craft and then ask the students to share their thoughts, but these men at Salinas Valley started talking about what was going on in the poem before I could get a word in! On the first day, two of the men started arguing heatedly about syntax. Syntax! I anticipated that the men would want to write their own poems and share them, but I hadn’t anticipated how hungry they were for intelligent conversation about poems. For many of these men it was also one of the only times in their lives that they had ever had the chance to be in conversations where everyone was listening, curious, respectful.

Although I didn’t teach there long, I was able to put out the call for other writers and teachers in our community to carry on the workshop and it went on until the pandemic. When I was Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz, I also started, in collaboration with Nancy Miller Gomez, a local poet, a project of workshops in the Santa Cruz City jails. We now have seven ongoing weekly workshops and Nancy, in her current role as SC Poet Laureate, has extended the workshops into juvenile hall and a number of local high schools.

DG: Your last three books were released by Copper Canyon Press. What are things you love about the publishing house and how much input do you have regarding covers, layout, font, and so on?

EB: I love love love Copper Canyon Press. When I first began working with them I could hardly believe how “functional” an organization they were (as opposed to "dysfunctional"). Everyone at CCP is deeply committed to poetry and poets and they demonstrate that throughout the process of publishing the book and after. Michael Wiegers, the Editor in Chief, makes me feel like I’m the most important person in the world and I know he makes every other poet feel the same way. From the contract all the way to copy-editing, cover, promo, etc. they are a dream team.

DG: How consistent is your writing process? Are you pretty organized in terms of how you approach a poem or is spontaneity in both the first draft and revision the key?

EB: My writing is inconsistent and unorganized! I catch poems any way I can and rarely can I catch them the same way twice. If being organized and working hard were the key to writing poems for me, I’d be writing a lot more poems. I’m a worker bee and if it’s work that will do it, I can get it done. But poems have a mind of their own—or at least mine do—and my relationship with each one is different. Kind of like with people. I’m a person who likes to control things, but I can’t control the poems. I’m at their mercy. I can only be willing. And I believe that the muse is flying around and if she sees someone at their desk or with their notebook trying, that she’s more likely to throw that poet a bone.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

EB: I just wrote an introduction to Frank X. Gaspar’s New and Selected: Poem Fire. I think Frank is our greatest underknown poet and I’ve made it one of my minor missions in life to introduce people to his poems. He’s a brilliant poet.

I’m also going through my old notebooks—a process I call “death preparation,” because there are things I don’t want lying around after I die. I’m 78 and although I hope to live for many years, mortality has become real. In the process I’ve come across bits and pieces and drafts of poems that somehow I couldn’t do anything with. I think I didn’t have the skill set at the time. But now, I can see how to work with some of that material and have resurrected some poems I’m pleased with from that morass. And I’m always trying to write new poems. I’m happiest when I’m writing.

Author Bio:

Ellen Bass’s most recent books are Indigo, (Copper Canyon, 2020), Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon, 2014), and The Human Line (Copper Canyon, 2007). She coedited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (Doubleday, 1973) and coauthored The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1988). Among her honors are Fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, The Lambda Literary Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and at the Santa Cruz County jails, and she teaches in the MFA program in writing at Pacific University. She is currently serving as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.