Molly Fisk: California Poets Part 8, Five Poems
January 8th, 2025
California Poets: Part VIII
Molly Fisk
Five Poems
Toronto
I was in a taxicab in Toronto
once, an empty freeway at night
heading from the airport to a hotel
downtown as I did in those days,
and I'm sure the driver was white
because it was so cold and I never
thought, as I would have then,
what is it like to be black and cold?
Don't black people want to be
warm? Thoughts I never knew
I was thinking, the white noise
of an unexamined life on white
American middle-class autopilot,
though one of my bosses at the bank
was black, and it never crossed
my mind to wonder if Chicago
was too cold for her, she was a person
to me for better or worse depending
on my loan performance, a woman
in a herringbone coat who changed
from pumps into white Reeboks
like I did, or fur-lined boots if
it had snowed that day, to walk home
in — not a stranger — flakes thick
in the air in a pyramid shape under
the street lights, the quiet crunch
of a passing car as its tires bit
the accumulation, that funny way
snow can be dry when it's newly
fallen, whereas this night in Toronto
it was plowed up against the guard
rails and the cab's wheels slished
on the wet asphalt like a forced
whisper. The driver used a phrase
I'd never heard before, Emmylou
on the radio and me saying something
just to be human, to show that I
appreciated the ride, about her voice
or the album, who knows? And he
laughed and said She can leave
her shoes under my bed any time.
It was one of those moments
that men and women can sometimes
find, in the dark, on a job, that are
stripped of desire but full of a shared
understanding of desire, intimate
and universal, both, and accidental,
but so strong you remember them
thirty years later. I can see now, looking
back, that this was the beginning
of my end as a banker and of my turn
toward language, though it would be
half a life again before I recognized
white was also a color.
Old Men in Cafés
and how they just have to keep talking,
sentence after vague sentence, because they are men,
an attempt to connect but interrupting whatever
you're thinking or writing at your out-of-the-way table,
a breeze bearing off the pandemic germs and what
you missed most in isolation, the sense of belonging
to your own town, a human among its kind,
didn't include the memory of these overly-loud voices,
the bluster and cheer, or how to find compassion
as the sound grates into your ears and the line
is lost, the focus. You know it's another face of love
and a hope to be part of art's making but braided through
is the maddening assumption that women must listen
to men, the expectation of attention, that we will
put down our pens and smile, parry the jovial remarks,
that we won't risk seeming unfriendly. I am not
unfriendly, I am working. Show some respect.
Einstein's Theory of General Relativity
Because I can waste a whole day
feeling sorry for myself, or smug
about something I won't remember
three weeks hence, and I don't
want spring to come either,
it's too soon for the cacophony —
my people, I blame it on lineage,
come from a northern clime
and need another month to gather
what's left of our hibernating psyches
into something resembling common
sense — I have to imagine time
as ocean: vast, deep, cold, tidal.
What Margaret Sanger might have said
in retrospect washing up on shore
to join Basho's ink pot, Agamemnon's
favorite horse, a trilobite, an apple
pie, my mother's French blue cardigan
from high school that she always
missed, the way light cuts the Arno
in old photographs of Florence,
some clay beads alleged to have been
strung on the first known abacus,
low boots from Lapland sewn
of reindeer hide where the hair faces
against the direction you're going,
for traction. At night when sleep is long
in coming, I lull my synapses amassing
lists like this to undermine chronology.
In the dark, the daffodils are blooming.
Coastal Safety Regulation
Lifeguards rescue tens of thousands of people from
rip currents in the U.S. every year. N.O.A.A.
My mother drew a knife flat across teaspoons of cinnamon.
Her skill was exactitude, directions to the letter, a dishtowel
over one shoulder so she could wipe her hands as she went,
pulling the albumen from its little hitch on the eggshell's
inside surface, creaming butter with an old wooden spoon.
My father's omelettes turned into scrambled eggs every time,
mushrooms and sausage thrown over his shoulder into the pan,
a handful of cheddar, some thyme, sizzling while he stood
grandstanding, inventing a story about Achilles and Patroklus
or Genghis Kahn making breakfast for a thousand men.
The only way to escape a rip tide — two currents that meet
the shore from opposite directions and pull you straight out
to sea — is swim laterally until you get beyond their strength
and can turn toward the coast again and make your way in,
relying on stamina and buoyancy and yelling for help
because this is how people drown.
Epithalamium for Wildfire & Dry Timber
Clearly passionate — short-lived and incendiary — bright
as day but hotter — ember-cast a prediction of son and daughter,
a warning. No future — barring smoke, whose particulate matter —
bluebird primary, bench seat of abandoned Chevy Blazer, bobcat
dew claw, chipmunk whisker — will rest securely in the lungs
of their wedding guests forever after. Hear, hear! A toast
to the glowing couple — may ladder fuels surround them, no
inversion layer, no night breezes down canyon dampen their ardor.
Interview
February 15th, 2025
California Poets Interview Series:
Molly Fisk, Poet, Editor, Radio Commentator
interviewed by David Garyan
DG: When did you start writing?
MF: Aside from letters, college papers, and bank analyses of the Canadian timber industry, my first creative writing was a poem in December, 1990, when I was 35.
DG: Do you remember your first poem?
MF: I do. For a while I had it by heart but that has faded. It was pretty aggressive, modeled very much on Mary Oliver's style with a general “you” the way she seems to be talking to us all, and obliquely about child abuse, something I was just discovering had happened to me and was horrified about. Five years after I wrote it I realized it included a phrase from a Leonard Cohen song that I hadn't known I was lifting.
DG: For years you’ve done “Observations from a Working Poet,” a radio commentary show on KVMR-FM Nevada City, CA. How did that start and how does the show influence your own writing?
MF: In 2005, the News Director at the time was looking to beef up their news coverage and wanted to add in some commentary. She approached me to do a weekly three minutes and said I could talk about anything as long as I didn't use the seven bad words that will incur a huge FCC fine. No one knows which words those are exactly, by the way, but you can imagine. I had never written prose for public consumption, but I was already a radio broadcaster at the station and I love radio, I love all the NPR voices and Terry Gross and Click and Clack. So I gulped and said yes, and for some reason numbered the first ones I wrote, to keep track of them, so I can tell you that last week was my 670th essay for KVMR.
Writing them has taught me most of what I know about editing. Three minutes is close to 550 words, and at first I timed everything and was always coming in too long or too short. So I learned how to stretch or compress a sentence and still say what I meant, inverting things, rewriting, taking out filler words that I use in spoken speech, all that stuff. I also learned to trust that I would have something to say by the end of writing them, which I didn't know when I took up my pen. And they began to find their own form: I start somewhere, elaborate a bit, move onto something unrelated, and then manage to tie the two things together in the end. I have no plans or aims for how they end. This is one of the wonderful things about writing, that you can surprise and educate yourself as you go along. I just love it. It works in my poems much of the time, too. The endings just appear, and matter. It fills me with joy and gratitude to nail an ending.
DG: There are poets who’ve done radio shows, but not many have worked at hospitals—certainly not for as long as you have. Can you talk a bit about the work you’ve done with the Writing to Heal program and the role of poetry in the medical context?
MF: One of our local doctors was working to expand the level of support at our hospital's Cancer Center, and asked for tryouts for a writing class that patients and their families, friends, and caregivers could take, to express the strong feelings they were having. I had cancer in my early 30s, my mother was dying of cancer at the time, and I'd been teaching trauma survivors for a few years: mostly child abuse and Viet Nam veterans.
I've made my living teaching in non-academic settings and am always looking for new places to do it, so I tried out, and my day happened to be the day after my mom died. I was a mess and was going to cancel, but then I thought “who else is going to understand how I feel today?” I got the job, and ended up teaching the class for 22 years. It wasn't creative writing, it was so-called Expressive Writing; the craft wasn't the point, it was a way for people to loosen up their minds and get some space. I loved being with people every week who weren't pretending. That kind of near-death strips the posturing and performing we can all get into right out of us. What's left is pretty raw and beautifully human.
But as to poetry specifically in a medical context, I think that since poems are so closely tied to emotion, both for the reader and the writer, they can be a direct, immediate relief for pain and confusion. Just look how in a social context people turn to poems the minute anything goes wrong: the World Wars, 9/11, the Covid Pandemic, Ukraine, Gaza... suddenly people are sending each other Auden, Merwin, Rukeyser, Rich, Oliver. When they can't express themselves well enough or at all, they find a poem to do it for them. A friend of mine calls poets Second Responders. We come after the ambulance and the operating room and the fire trucks, but we're not far behind.
DG: You’ve described yourself as a “feminist with a capital F.” To what extent do you see the next four years as a challenge to not only feminism but issues of social justice in general?
MF: You asked this question on Jan 29th and now it's Feb 14th. In those two weeks, I think we've learned the answer. The word “challenge” doesn't cover it for me. It's fire-fighting at the most desperate level. I can see some long-term benefits to rousing our population to action, but the death and destruction that will be happening in the meantime is no kind of trade-off. It's horrifying. For feminists, humanists, social justice champions, animals, plants, and everyone else.
DG: If you could be mentored by any historical or living person, who would that be and why?
MF: I was mentored by a living person when I started writing poems out of nowhere at the age of 35, and it was Dorianne Laux. Our connection lasted four years and I think she was the perfect teacher for me: for her writing skills, intellectual curiosity, transgressive-for-the-times subject matter, and class background, which was the opposite of mine. I learned so much, and quote her all the time to my students and to myself, 30 years later.
Otherwise, I'd like to go for a slow walk with Grace Paley, Simone de Beauvoir, Phillis Wheatley, and Jane Austen separately, and then sit down to tea together.
DG: What was more difficult to write—the first or your latest book?
MF: Oh, gosh. They're all different, but equally full of starting and stopping and doubting and unmitigated glee that won't last. I think with a first book there's the newness and excitement to carry you further than later ones when you — that is, I and my friends who've talked about this — feel as though you need to match or outdo the original one. Also you have to learn how to fight against the idea of pleasing an audience if you've gotten any praise for the first one.
DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?
MF: At the moment I'm waiting with bated breath for my next collection to come out, which is due in Spring, 2026 from the wonderful Red Hen Press and is a departure from anything I've done before. It's a book of linked poems (not a novel-in-poems at all, there's too much open space in it) about a young couple in 1875 who move from Oregon to northeastern California's Surprise Valley to start a life together. It's called Walking Wheel, which is a type of spinning wheel. These are poems about hard work and love.
I have another manuscript that for a while was making the rounds — mostly personal stuff and climate chaos — but I've had to stop sending it out lest it get accepted and the publication schedule coincide with Walking Wheel. Each book deserves its own moment and support from me. Once the timing is right, probably this coming fall, I can start sending that one out again. And I write all the time, so who knows what is brewing among the random poems in my files. I wish I had a clear subject or goal for a book, but that's never been how I work. The 1875 book didn't make any sense to me until I had about 50 poems, and most of the time I felt I was channeling some younger self of mine who had read Laura Ingalls Wilder too many times. Then it revealed itself, and I was able to shape and steer it more easily.
I am reading very little, alas. This month my goal is to start retraining my brain away from screens and back to the page again. Power outages are very handy for this, and it is winter, but we haven't had one yet. The last poetry collection I read was Diane Seuss's Modern Poetry, and the last novel was Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk. (She won the Nobel in Literature in 2018.)
Author Bio:
Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, her new collection Walking Wheel is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Fisk, who lives in the Sierra foothills, has also won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Comments